The Facebook founder is likely to face a record loss as his company’s stock plummeted.
(Photo: imago images/photothek)
San Francisco, Denver It wasn’t a good day for Mark Zuckerberg. The CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta presented disappointing quarterly figures on Wednesday, which caused the share to collapse by 23 percent in after-hours trading.
If the bad mood continues on Thursday at the start of the New York stock exchange, Zuckerberg would have lost $24 billion of his personal wealth – at least on paper. It would be one of the biggest one-day losses ever, according to data from financial services firm Bloomberg. That would melt Zuckerberg’s fortune from a good $120 billion to $97 billion – and he would no longer be in the list of the ten richest people in the world.
Speaking to analysts on Wednesday, however, Zuckerberg tried to draw a positive balance of his company’s business. “We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and companies of all sizes turned to us to help them reach people,” Zuckerberg said. He didn’t say a word about the fact that Facebook had seen its daily user numbers drop for the first time in the company’s history.
In addition, Zuckerberg tried to draw big lines. This week is his anniversary, he has been running the company for 18 years. A lot has changed in that time: “In the early 2000s, text was the main way to share and consume content online – until we had cameras on our phones and photos became the most important thing.” College dropout to become one of the richest people on the planet.
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Caught up again by Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett, of all people, could now pass Zuckerberg on the list of the richest people. The 91-year-old head of the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate has been repeatedly overtaken by tech giants such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla boss Elon Musk and Zuckerberg in recent years and can now make up ground.
Buffett is benefiting like no other from the current shift in sentiment on the stock markets. Berkshire stock is up 5.5 percent so far this year, while the broader S&P 500 is down a good 4 percent.
Berkshire is big on legacy industry, has a big energy division, and Berkshire’s stock portfolio includes banking and energy stocks, which tend to do well in times of rising inflation. The largest position in the portfolio, Apple, was also able to score recently. Tech stocks in general have long been the stars of Wall Street, but they’ve had a particularly tough time of late.
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