Author: Seyedhamidreza Alavi
Date of Publication: 16/11/2022
In the past year, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has lost more than half of his wealth. Since 2015, Mark Zuckerberg has always been among the 10 richest people in the U.S but he isn’t on the list anymore. More precisely, since September 2021 Zuckerberg has lost around 76.8 billion dollars equal to half of his fortune. This leads to a drop from the third place on the Forbes’ 400 list of the U.S wealthiest people to the 11th place. So, his wealth is about 57.7 Billion dollars worth. This amount is by far more than the money of anyone in America who has lost as much over the past year.
As this rich-famous figure owns Meta (formerly Facebook), the stock price of this company has seen a significant decrease of 57% compared to last year’s Forbes 400. Meta was not the only company affected by the recent market downturn, in fact, most tech companies have seen a decrease in their stock prices. However, Meta’s fall was much deeper than both the Nasdaq (-9.8%) and the S&P 500 which hit -13.5%. Also compared to other big-tech companies Meta’s stock price has decreased more. Stock prices of Microsoft, Alphabet (Google parent), and Amazon have all fallen by 14%, 25%, and 27% respectively. All considered Meta’s dive was much deeper compared to all other big techs.
How did it start?
As always, Apple had a major role in this part. Last year, Apple made a privacy policy update which made it quite hard for the tech companies applications to track users data within their platforms. As the update officially released, it was followed by a shock toward the investors of the big-tech.
Facebook, or mainly Meta, used to make most of its profit out of its advertisement system within all of its platforms. However, now they are facing some real challenges. Due to the recent privacy policy regulated by Apple, Meta no longer has access to users' data. Basically it means that their advertisers are no longer able to say whether campaign x was successful or not due to the lack of required data.
Zuckerberg’s Dives
Although this year wasn’t good enough for Zuckerberg, it wasn’t the first time that his net worth is falling down. In fact, there are some real challenges ahead of his entire kingdom of Meta. Zuckerberg’s first status of billionaire was in 2008 around 4 years after creating Facebook. When he stepped into 23, he was the youngest self made billionaire at that time placing him at 321th place in the Forbes 400. More specifically, he owned 1.5 billion dollars. His net worth’s growth didn’t stop there and by 2011 it increased almost 12 times to 17.5 bilione. However, 2012 had some bad surprises for Zuckerberg and he fell down from N.14 to N.36 in Forbes 400. Yet he managed to jump back in the following year and continue the growth of his net worth up until now.
Zuckerberg’s net worth’s downtrend in the past year
As we can see in the chart, his net worth has had a significant decrease from 120 billion dollars to lower than 40 billion ($36 billion) over the past year.
