Bono Did Not Make 1 5 Billion Off Facebook Let S Clear This Rumor Up Right Now

The rumor that has spread all around the web this week is that Bono has recently become a billionaire thanks to an investment he made in Facebook back before the social network went public. Is this rumor true? Unfortunately not. In fact, it is far far far far from being true. It is true that Bono, through his private equity firm Elevation Partners, purchased a big pre-IPO stake in Facebook, but that doesn’t mean Bono earned $1.5 billion. Here’s the truth: In 2009, Elevation Partenrs purchased $90 million worth of Facebook stock. It added another $120 million in FB stock in 2010. Fast forward a couple years and lots of media outlets have reported that the value of those early stakes is now somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. This part of the story is probably accurate. Based on this information, a lot of media outlets jumped to the conclusion that Bono himself must now part of the billionaire rock star club and also one of the richest celebrities in the world. In reality, Bono is one of six founding members of Elevation Partners. Furthermore, Elevation is private equity firm that primarily invests other people’s money. So, in this specific Facebook example, Elevation would likely be entitled to 20% of whatever gains that were realized from the investment. Based on these numbers, a more reasoned estimate, provided by Fortune’s Dan Primack, is that Bono personally made around $43 million off the Facebook investment. A healthy sum, definitely, but a long way off from making Bono a billionaire. Bono has consistently tried to beat down this false rumor about him being a Facebook billionaire. Back in 2012, during an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Bono said the following: So perhaps in light of the most recent resurgence of this story, we might get another fervent denial from Bono that he’s richer than the Beatles thanks to Facebook’s stock market fortunes. If we don’t, maybe the rumors are true – and “this boy” finally considers himself one of the haves. Oh and for what it’s worth, even without the Facebook billions, Bono is still sitting on a current net worth of $700 million. That’s enough to make him the 17th richest celebrity in the world. He’s $500 million away from Paul McCartney who is the sixth richest celebrity. He’s $4.4 BILLION away from George Lucas, who with a net worth of $5.1 billion, is the richest celeb on the planet by far.