Meta and Alphabet’s new dividends reward shareholders—especially the founders

After the tech giants announced their first-ever stock dividends, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, each stand to make hundreds of millions of millions a year.

Paying a dividend for the first time is a big deal for a giant company that has been focused on growing as rapidly as possible without worrying about sending periodic cash payments to its shareholders. So it’s a very big deal when two of America’s most valuable companies—Google-parent company Alphabet and Facebook-parent Meta—announce that they’re going to start paying dividends to their shareholders, as they’ve both done recently.