The biggest hit Mark Zuckerberg has copped on the chin this year doesn’t have anything to do with his MMA training, but rather his net worth.
With Q4 still left on the calendar, the Meta Founder & CEO’s enviable fortune is already $71 billion lighter than when it entered 2022 ($125.5 billion for those of you who can’t math). This in turn has pushed him down the rankings of both Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index (#6 to #20) and the Forbes billionaires list (#3 to #22).
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A good majority of the missing billions can be attributed to the Meta stock’s (NASDAQ: META) dizzying fall from grace. Since Facebook restructured and rebranded to become Meta, the share price has declined in value by approximately 60%, dragging down Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth along with it.
So what’s the deal?
Back in February, it was revealed Facebook’s daily active users had dropped for the very first time. The company also admitted there had been an ongoing struggle to remain relevant with the younger generation, having effectively blown a ten-year lead against the likes of TikTok in an everchanging and ruthlessly competitive digital landscape.
Now, it’s scrambling to keep up with Facebook and Instagram reels, alongside a widely denigrated test function that’s essentially a BeReal knock-off.
Additionally, investors had been “startled” by the news of diminishing profits. Meta noted it had anticipated revenue growth to slow as users spent less and less time on its platforms. This was, however, nothing more than cold comfort in a world where the bottom line comes first and explanations come second.
The cherry on top? Expensive metaverse projects that were proving far from fruitful.
As a result, the Meta share price plunged by as much as 27%, erasing an unprecedented $230 billion from its market capitalisation within a single trading session. The development was described as the biggest one-day decline in US history, dwarfing every other loss sustained in Wall Street’s tech stock bloodbath by sheer comparison. Zuckerberg’s own net worth fell by almost $30 billion. Neither share price nor net worth has recovered ever since.
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Still, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t backing down from his metaverse crusade anytime soon.
“You know the next vision for the broader internet could potentially get there, you just don’t know how long it takes and what exactly Meta’s role will be… all you know right now is, essentially, it’s going to cost a lot of money,” Mark Zuckerberg recently stated on The Joe Rogan Experience.
“My goal for these next set of platforms, they are going to be more immersive, and hopefully they’ll be more useful – but I don’t necessarily want people to spend more time with computers. I just want the time that people spend with screens to be better.”
Plus at the risk of stating the painfully obvious: a revised net worth of $55.3 billion is more than enough to keep Mark Zuckerberg, wife Priscilla, and their three kids across several lifetimes. And far more than what 99.9999% of the world could even dream of accruing.
