Facebook Co-founder sells shares for $8.8 million

Facebook’s Dustin Moskovitz sells 450,000 shares.

One of Facebook’s co-founders has joined the ranks of major players in the company who have recently unloaded major portions of their stock by selling shares for $8.8 million.

According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Dustin Moskovitz, 28, unloaded 450,000 shares, or about 6% of his holdings in the company he helped Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg  found in 2004.

Moskovitz began selling the Facebook shares late last week and continued through Monday, according to the documents made public Tuesday. He made three sales of 150,000 shares each, for a total of about $8.8 million. Moskovitz still owns 7.05 million shares, worth more than $137 million, based on Facebook’s closing stock price Wednesday.

Facebook stock sales: In the Aug. 23 Business section, an article on the sale of 450,000 shares of Facebook stock by company co-founder Dustin Moskovitz said that represented 6% of his holdings and that he had 7.05 million shares remaining. Those figures concerned only his Class A shares. He says his total Facebook holdings, including other classes of shares, actually exceed 100 million shares. The headline on the online version of this article has been corrected accordingly.

But Moskovitz’s share dump didn’t compare to that of Peter Thiel, who was one of the earliest people to invest in the social network.

In an SEC filing Monday, Thiel was revealed to have cashed out more than 20 million shares for about $396 million.

Thiel’s recent sale, along with his shares sold during Facebook’s IPO in May, have turned his early $500,000 investment in Facebook into a more than $1-billion return.

Facebook shares closed at $19.44 on Wednesday, up 1.46%.