The metaverse project cost Mark Zuckerberg dearly: $71 billion in assets “evaporated”, sometimes losing $31 billion in just one day

Late last year, Facebook experienced a major turning point when it changed its name to Meta, in order to realize the ambition to move to the “virtual universe” metaverse of boss Mark Zuckerberg. However, nearly a year has passed, it seems that the shift to the “virtual universe” is costing this billionaire quite a lot in the real world.

Since the beginning of the year, nearly every tech billionaire in America has struggled. However, the amount of assets “evaporated” of the CEO Meta Platforms really stood out with a drop of up to 50%, or a loss of about $ 71 billion. This was the steepest decline among the world’s richest billionaires tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The Facebook boss has dropped 14 places on the list of the richest billionaires in the world.

Currently with 55.9 billion USD, Mark is only in the top 20 richest billionaires in the world, falling to the lowest position since 2014. He is behind the 3 Waltons brothers (who own the Walmart retail chain) and 2 members of the Koch family.

Just less than two years ago, at the age of 38, Zuckerberg was holding $106 billion, second only to Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. By September 2021, that number peaked at $142 billion, when Facebook’s stock price hit $382.

In October 2021, Zuckerberg introduced Meta and changed the company name from Facebook Inc to Meta Platforms. And since then his empire has continued to decline.

Recent earnings reports show mixed signals. In February, the company said the number of monthly Facebook users was not growing, sending the stock plummeting like never before. Zuckerberg’s fortune at one point dropped by $31 billion in just one day.

Other problems include an underfunded investment in Reels, a short video platform developed by Instagram and intended to compete with TikTok. Facebook invests here while the effectiveness of advertising revenue is not high, in the context that the entire industry is affected by the trend of cutting spending on marketing due to businesses’ concerns about the economic downturn.

Facebook stock has also been hit hard by its decision to invest in the metaverse, according to Laura Martin, a senior analyst at Needham & Co. Zuckerberg once predicted this project would “burn” a large amount of money in the next 3-5 years. In addition, Facebook also has some legal troubles.

The Menlo Park, California-based group is in worse shape than most companies in the FAANG group. Shares are down about 57% year-to-date, well above Apple’s 14%, Amazon’s 26% and Google’s 29%. Meta stock’s decline is close to the 60% of Netflix stock.

Mandeep Singh, technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said that without implementing the virtual space project, the performance of Facebook stock would be more similar to Alphabet. The corporation should now solve the problem by splitting up some segments like WhatsApp or Instagram.

Much of Zuckerberg’s fortune is tied to Meta stock. He owns more than 350 million shares. Closing yesterday, Meta’s stock price was around $146.

Zuckerberg is looking for ways to improve his image. In a recent 3-hour podcast with Joe Rogan, he repeatedly referred to himself as a “product designer”.

Refer to Bloomberg