When Mark Zuckerberg was plugged into his charger on Wednesday night, his physical body entered rest mode as the fifth-richest “person” on the planet. The only human beings richer than Zuckerberg were Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Unfortunately, by the time the rest mode program completed its cycle and the ZUCK-CPU began booting Thursday morning, a new reality quickly set-in.
On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook released a disastrous quarterly earnings report. The company missed on all of its major financial metrics and issued negative forward-looking guidance that admitted to significant competition coming from TikTok and a body blow coming from Apple’s war against app tracking.
In the wake of the earnings report Facebook’s stock price fell off a cliff when the markets opened on Thursday morning. By the end of the trading day Thursday, Facebook (which is technically now called “Meta” but, come on…) saw its stock price drop a little over 26%. It is the company’s biggest one-day stock price drop ever. The decline sliced $230 billion from Facebook’s market cap.
As the owner of roughly 13% of the company’s outstanding shares, a blood bath obviously has a massive impact on Mark’s net worth.
At the company’s Thursday closing share price, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth was $89 billion. It’s the first time Mark has been worth less than $100 billion since August 2020 when he first hit centibillionaire status.
That’s a $31 billion drop from the night before when he entered rest mode with a net worth of $120 billion. Mark’s net worth is now down $36 billion since January 1.
At $89 billion, Mark is no longer one of the 10 richest people in the world. By our count, his new rank is #12.
Mark and Facebook seem to have been facing non-stop existential PR disasters from the moment the company went public nearly a decade ago. But I have to say, this time does feel a little different. For the first time ever, they’re facing real competition from major rivals while also being investigated for anti-trust violations.
Full disclosure – I own 36 shares of Facebook in my stock portfolio. Those shares lost a little over $3,000 in value on Thursday. Not the biggest tragedy in the world, but still not fun.
On the other hand, I do take a little bit of pleasure in watching Facebook stumble. At least a dozen times in the last 6-7 years CelebrityNetWorth’s Facebook “reach” has been cut off by mindless and unexplained Facebook algorithm changes. CelebrityNetWorth has around 500,000 Facebook fans and on a GOOD day our articles reach 30,000 of those fans. That’s 6%.
When I started investing in our Facebook page back in 2015 the average post reached at least 25% of our fans. I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars building the fan page only to see our reach slowly dwindle. If you had told me back in 2014 that in 8 years our average post would reach 6% of fans, I would have taken those hundreds of thousands of dollars and bought a condo or a just invested in something else.
I will admit it’s been a bit better in the last year, but then it drops off a cliff for a few months without any warning.
Here are some real numbers:
In January 2021, the posts we published to our Facebook page resulted in a little over 2 million visitors coming to CelebrityNetWorth from Facebook. That was our biggest Facebook traffic month ever.
In January 2022, Facebook sent just 300,000 visits to CelebrityNetWorth. That’s an 85% drop with NOTHING changed on our end. Just Facebook being Facebook.
So ya. I think Mark and his employees can find a way to swallow a mere 36% drop.
Source: Celebrity Net Worth
