>"Surely the ownership would have to be backdated to around his last involvement with the company, which would be miniscule compared with Facebook's valuation today."
That would be a HUGE amount of money. Even if the subsequent investments are still legit (despite not having the involvement of the main investor), Zuckerberg owns like 30% of Facebook, so if you assume the primary investor wouldn't have gotten diluted worse than Zuckerberg, you're looking at tens of billions. Even if he gets diluted as bad as Saverin did (down to 1/7th), that's still like $5 billion or so, right? That's shit-tons of money.
Yeah, that's not how equity investing works. Even if you assume he had the worst in terms of anti-dilution provisions, that's still gonna be like 5% of a $50B company. If he gets Zuck's anti-dilution provisions, that's more like 20-25% of a $50B company.
I think what I said came out bad, what I mean is if the question of ownership was at a certain value, as in the value at the alleged time of sale can you really lay a challenge on it at any future point in the company for say that 5% diluted equity. Seems to leave the door open for people to create technicalities in deals and then treat it as a risk free investment, if they can challenge for it back at any time into the future.
Why wouldn't you be able to? Zuckerberg didn't allegedly defraud the plaintiff of cash, he allegedly defrauded the plaintiff of pre-Round-A Facebook shares. If I steal a lottery ticket from you and that ticket subsequently wins the Mega Millions or whatever, I don't just owe you the $5 ticket price, I owe you the lottery winnings, right?
That would be a HUGE amount of money. Even if the subsequent investments are still legit (despite not having the involvement of the main investor), Zuckerberg owns like 30% of Facebook, so if you assume the primary investor wouldn't have gotten diluted worse than Zuckerberg, you're looking at tens of billions. Even if he gets diluted as bad as Saverin did (down to 1/7th), that's still like $5 billion or so, right? That's shit-tons of money.