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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg keeps taking hits this year.
The CEO of Meta Platforms lost $71 billion according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is now ranked at his lowest spot since 2014. He is behind three Waltons and two members of the Koch family.
He was worth $106 billion a few years ago.
It all seems that things are going downhill after he announced the change from Facebook to Meta.
In February Meta revealed no growth in monthly Facebook users.
This led to a historic collapse in its stock price and Zuckerberg lost $31 billion overnight.
Yahoo Finance reported:
Other issues include Instagram’s bet on Reels — its answer to TikTok’s short-form video platform — even though it’s worth less in advertising revenue, while the industry overall has been affected by lower marketing spending due to concerns over an economic slowdown.
The stock is also being dragged down by the company’s investments in the metaverse, said Laura Martin, senior internet analyst at Needham & Co. Zuckerberg has said he expects the project will lose “significant” amounts of money in the next three to five years.
In the meantime, Meta “has to get these users back from TikTok,” said Martin. It’s also hampered by “excessive regulatory scrutiny and intervention,” she said.
The Menlo Park, California-based company is faring worse in 2022 than most of its FAANG peers. It’s down about 57% this year, far more than the declines of 14% for Apple Inc., 26% for Amazon.com Inc., and 29% for Google parent Alphabet Inc. Meta is even narrowing the gap in 2022 losses with Netflix Inc., which is down about 60%.
Most of Zuckerberg’s wealth is tied up in Meta stock. He holds more than 350 million shares, according to the company’s last statement.
Zuckerberg recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
He talked about the metaverse with Rogan.
“There’s more nonverbal communication when people are with each other than verbal communication,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
“When you’re on a video call you don’t actually feel like you’re there with the person. To me, what virtual reality unlocks is that it really convinces your brain that you’re there.”
He also talked about Facebook censoring posts around the 2020 election cycle.
“Basically the background here,” Zuckerberg said, “is the FBI I think basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that, so just be vigilant.’”
“For the…I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it, you could still consume it,” Zuckerberg continued.
“So when you say ‘the distribution is decreased.’ How does that work?” Rogan asked.
“Basically the ranking in news feed was a little bit less. So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise,” Zuckerberg replied.
