Skip to main content

Facebook General Counsel Soon to be Worth Millions After IPO

By Andrew Chow, Esq. on February 05, 2012 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

There's no better time to "Like" Facebook General Counsel Ted Ullyot. With Facebook's IPO on the horizon, the financial status of the company's top lawyer could be set for quite a lucrative update.

Ullyot, 44, joined Facebook as general counsel in 2008, according to Forbes. In addition to his base salary and annual retention bonuses totaling about $675,000 a year, Ullyot also owns a boatload of Facebook stock, the legal newspaper The Recorder reports.

Ullyot holds 35,600 shares of Facebook common stock. He also holds more than 1.8 million stock options and nearly 3.8 million restricted stock units subject to vesting conditions, according to The Recorder.

How much could that possibly be worth?

Based on an expected company valuation of $100 billion -- or about $53 a share, as reported by The New York Times -- Ullyot's holdings could be worth more than $300 million.

It seems joining the company in 2008 was one of the best moves, financially speaking, in Ullyot's nearly 20-year career in law:

Facebook General Counsel Ted Ullyott, a native of San Francisco, completed undergraduate studies at Harvard University in 1990 and earned a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1994.

Ullyot's career began with clerkships for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Fourth Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig, according to a profile in the Los Angeles Times. In 2000, Ullyott joined AOL Time Warner as associate general counsel; he became general counsel for AOL Time Warner Europe in 2002.

A year later, Ullyot joined President George W. Bush's administration, where he served stints as chief of staff at the Justice Department and deputy assistant to the President.

Ullyot left the White House in 2005 to become general counsel of a private investment firm. He joined Kirkland & Ellis' Washington, D.C., offices as a partner in 2008 before moving to Facebook.

When Ted Ullyot joined Facebook as general counsel, the site had about 100 million users; it's now grown to more than 800 million. With buzz surrounding Facebook's IPO continuing to grow, going public could make Ullyot a very rich man.

Related Resources:

Copied to clipboard