Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, lost $11 billion on Thursday after Meta shares plunged 24.5% to $36 billion, the lowest quarterly earnings since 2016.
Investors analysed the company’s third-quarter earnings and found a weak fourth-quarter outlook. The shares ended at $97.94, the lowest price since 2016.
Meta earned a quarterly revenue of $27.7 billion Wednesday. It is a decline of more than 4% yearly and is the second continuous quarterly drop. The company’s profit plummets 52% to $4.4 billion.
Worryingly, Meta shares decreased by more than 61% since the start of the year. Meta has been struggling to keep up with immediate improvements and development by their rivals like TikTok.
Additionally, there’s a stagnant slump in online ad spending, thus challenges from Apple’s iOS privacy update.
Zuckerberg expressed his thoughts about this issue in the company’s earnings call on Wednesday after the U.S. stock market closed.
“Look, I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment. But from what I can tell, I think that this is going to be a very important thing, and I think it would be a mistake for us not to focus on any of these areas, which I think are going to be fundamentally important to the future.”
Due to the decline of Meta’s stock, Zuckerberg moves from being the 25th richest person in the world to the 29th richest after market close on Thursday, reported by Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaire tracker.