Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has dropped by $70 billion so far this year, bumping him down from the third to 20th richest human in the world.
At the start of 2022, the index states, Zuckerberg was worth $125 billion. However, Bloomberg called the company’s October 2021 pivot from Facebook Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc. as a major wrong-way shift in its fortunes, writing, “it’s been largely downhill from there as it struggles to find its footing in the tech universe.”
Some reasons for the company’s financial landslide include Facebook reporting a decline in daily active users for the first time in its history in the fourth quarter of 2021, which had substantial stock market ramifications. Plus, Meta’s Q2 net income plummeted 36 percent in 2021, adding up to a $3 billion loss, according to Business Insider.
The company is also doubling down—expensively—on investments in their new and somewhat-understood super-project, the metaverse. In 2021, Meta spent around $10 billion on metaverse investments, and said that, since April, over 10,000 employees were hard at work on metaverse projects.
There’s a chance that the Zucks may not be too terribly worried, taking Meta as a loss leader for now.
“The metaverse business for us isn’t really going to be a meaningful contributor to the business until at a minimum much later in this decade,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May, “and probably realistically this decade is going to be about setting the foundation for that and then the 2030s are really where this is going to contribute a lot to the profits of this company.”
Zuckerberg isn’t the only fabulously well-to-do man who suffered a significant loss to his value of late. Last week, after the stock market had its worst day since June 2020, eight of the 10 richest men in the world also took a giant hit to their net worth.
Tesla king and space baron Elon Musk, Amazon founder and perennial second-placer Jeff Bezos, along with Alphabet founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—not to mention OG Billionaire Bill Gates and few more strays, lost a combined $50 billion.
