A month after reaching a net worth of $142 billion, Mark Zuckerberg launched Meta and made several announcements about augmented reality and virtual reality in 2022.
Mark Zuckerberg lost roughly $71 billion of his fortune in 2022, despite refocusing on the burgeoning metaverse market. Although many people are making money in the metaverse business, it seems that Mark Zuckerberg’s foray has cost some of his fortune. And this, despite the adventure of Facebook in AR and VR products and its rebranding to Meta, as the entire tech space in the US is having a rough year.
Mark Zuckerberg is currently ranked 20th in Bloomberg Billionaires Index after losing half his fortune in 2022. Data shows he’s now worth $55.3 billion. His value places him at his lowest rank since 2014 and below three Waltons and two Koch family members. It’s a big change for Zuckerberg, who joined an elite group of global billionaires less than two years ago. The Facebook executive joined the group, which included only Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, when it was worth $106 billion. His fortune peaked at $142 billion in September 2021, when his company’s shares soared to $382. Today, shares of Goal The platforms have dropped significantly and are currently trading around $148.
Zuckerberg sees $71 billion disappear from his net worth in 2022.
A month after reaching a fortune of $142 billion, Zuckerberg launched Meta and made several AR and VR announcements in 2022. However, there have only been negative impacts since the name change. Meta is on the decline, and Facebook said in February that it hasn’t seen an increase in its number of new users. All of this translated into a drop in the company’s stock and a loss for the CEO. He lost $31 billion at the time, one of the biggest drops in fortune in a single day.
According to Needham & Co analyst Laura Martin, Meta’s investments in the metaverse it will affect its stock and Zuckerberg, whose wealth has shrunk significantly since the name change. The analyst mentions that Facebook needs to get its users back from TikTok, which has more than a billion users. Furthermore, he feels that Meta suffers from a “excessive regulatory oversight and intervention.”
Down nearly 56% since January, Meta ranks as the worst performer among its FAANG peers. With the exception of Netflix, which is down almost 60% since the beginning of the year, its FAANG counterparts, Apple, Amazon and Google, have lost no more than 30% in 2022. Meta is down 0.89% to $146.71 before trading. The company has plunged 58.59% in the last year and has lost 5.75% in the last three months. Meta also fell 8.12% and plunged more than 3% in the last five days.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh also commented on Mark Zuckerberg’s fortunes falling in 2022. He believes Meta can still avoid losses by working on his other businesses like instagram and WhatsApp. Analysts added that the company might have been better off had it not entered the virtual reality space.