Facebook board member Marc Andreessen sells 73 per cent stake in two weeks

Shares of Facebook slipped over 3 per cent in intraday trade on Monday following news reports that board member Marc Andreessen has sold about three quarters of his stake in the company over the past two weeks.

Andreessen has been Facebook board member since 2008 and has unloaded more than 73 per cent of his total ownership in the company, and 90 per cent of his class A shares. Class A shares are those which do not carry voting rights.

Technology website Re/code says the US Securities and Exchange Commission filings show the venture capitalist has sold over 1.5 million Facebook shares at a value of roughly $160 million since October 30.

Andreessen still owns almost 378,000 shares of Class B stock, but voting rights for Facebook don't count as CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself controls 60 per cent of the board's voting power, the report said.

Reacting to the news, shares of Facebook skidded as much as 3.34 per cent to $100.47 on Nasdaq on Monday, but recovered all its losses to settle the day at $104.04, up 0.09 per cent.

The personal stake sale by Andreessen is noteworthy given the fast pace of offloading in unusually short span of time. Another thing to note is that the sale happened around the time Facebook announced its quarterly earnings on November 4. Buoyed by its mobile-advertising efforts, the social networking site posted 11.3 per cent profit at $4.5 billion in revenue in its third quarter results, compared to $4.04 billion last quarter with a significant increase in the number of its active users.