The fall continues for Mark Zuckerberg. The one who still monopolized in 2021, the fifth position of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index continues to fall. He is now only the 22nd richest person in the world. And he, who has been listed among the 10 richest people in the United States since 2015, is now only the 16th richest man in his country.
The fall of the former Silicon Valley prince is spectacular. In one year, the Facebook founder and current head of the Meta group has seen the value of his assets melt by nearly $80 billion. From $131 billion in September 2021, Zuckerberg’s fortune is now $51.2 billion.
Certainly, the current stock market environment is not very favorable for large fortunes. Elon Musk “lost” 25 billion in 2022, Jeff Bezos 54 billion, Bernard Arnault 51 billion and Bill Gates almost 32 billion. But none have experienced a debacle on the level of Mark Zuckerberg’s.
Because the share price of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is going through an unprecedented storm. Because of its scale and above all because of its duration. But Mark Zuckerberg makes most of his fortune from Meta stock, of which he owns 13% of the shares. Since September 2021, Meta has lost 57% of its value. Much more than Amazon (-27% in the period), Alphabet-Google (-25%) or the entire Nasdaq (9.8%).
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What’s going on in the Facebook realm that’s spooking investors? First of all, there’s this decision by Apple to limit data collection, which hampers the strategy of social media and the Menlo Park group in particular. This inability for Meta to track its users on iOS apps is starting to hurt the group’s wallet. Meta reported its first quarterly revenue decline in July, down 1% to $28.8 billion. It’s not a disaster, but after years of double-digit growth, the latest results mark a change feared by investors.
Fewer advertisers and perhaps even more serious: fewer users. In February, Meta announced its first quarterly loss of daily active users. One million people have left the services of Mark Zuckerberg’s group. Again, there’s no danger in delay, but this change again marks an unprecedented change since the group’s inception in 2004. Especially since a recent internal report showed that Instagram Reels is struggling to compete with competitor TikTok. The new generations have adopted the Chinese social network and are moving away from American services.
Aware that his group needs a revolutionary innovation, Zuckerberg launched the Metaverse project in 2021, a global virtual universe that the group imagines as the internet of tomorrow. The problem is that many observers doubt the success of such a project. Especially since, by Facebook’s own admission, the entire metaverse envisioned by the group shouldn’t see the light of day for ten years. Meanwhile, the division in charge of developing it within the company, Meta Reality Labs, lost $10 billion in 2021.
As a reminder, Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire in 2008, just four years after creating Facebook. In 2015 he made a thunderous entry into the top 10 of the world’s greatest fortunes at just 30 years old, from which he was expelled in recent weeks. Will Zuckerberg get over his midlife crisis?
Source: BFM TV
