Mark Zuckerberg has suffered a massive setback to his personal wealth, after a recent Meta Industries (formerly Facebook) stock disaster caused shares of the social media network to plummet.
The damage occurred after Facebook released an underwhelming revenue forecast on Thursday, when Meta’s market cap shedded $232 billion dollars, falling from $879 billion on Wednesday evening to $647 billion the subsequent day—the largest single-day drop for any company in the history of the U.S. stock market, constituting a 30 percent decline altogether.
Zuckerberg’s personal wealth fell from $120.6 billion on Wednesday to $92 billion, placing him outside the ranks of the top ten wealthiest individuals in the world for the first time since 2015. This $31 billion loss constitutes the second-biggest loss of wealth ever caused by a share-price plummet, falling just short of Elon Musk’s $35 billion dollar loss after conducting a Twitter poll asking his followers if he should sell 10 percent of his Tesla stock.
Zuckerberg isn’t the only captain of industry to suffer a blow to their personal assets: Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg reportedly lost $100 million dollars of an estimated $2.5 billion fortune, though the impact is less severe on Sandberg’s more diverse financial portfolio.
The sell-off is just one of the many challenges which have afflicted Meta in the past year. While the company’s stock had avoided outright catastrophe until Thursday, the company had underperformed the Nasdaq throughout the past year, causing wary investors to name the Meta as “the Worst Company of 2021” in a Yahoo Finance survey last December. With Thursday’s upset for Meta Industries, the poll now seems remarkably prescient.
