Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta Platforms, saw a $12.4 billion increase in his net worth on Thursday, bringing it to $67.6 billion, as the company’s shares soared 23% the day after it released its quarterly earnings.
Since Facebook (now Meta) went public in May 2012, it has been Zuckerberg’s largest one-day gain.
American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Zuckerberg. His most notable accomplishment is co-founding and serving as CEO of Facebook, a social networking site that he started in 2004 while a student at Harvard University.
Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Facebook has grown into one of the largest and most influential technology companies in the world, with over 2.8 billion monthly active users.
People can connect with friends and family, join or create interest groups, and share information, photos, and videos on Facebook, a social networking site. Giving people the ability to create community and unite the world is central to the company’s mission.
Facebook owns a number of well-known apps and websites in addition to its primary social networking service, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.
In addition, Zuckerberg is well known for his philanthropy. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015 with the goal of advancing equality and human potential.
The organization focuses on issues like criminal justice reform, science, and education.
Overall, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have had a significant impact on the technology industry and the way people around the world communicate and connect
For about seven years, Zuckerberg was among the world’s top ten richest people.
However, last fall, when Meta’s share price fell due to dwindling advertising revenue, competition from TikTok, and a general tech downturn, Zuckerberg was forced to leave this exclusive club.
According to reports from the real-time billionaire’s tracker, he is currently the 16th richest person in the world.
That is an increase from No. 22 one day prior, but it is still far behind his No. 3 ranking from September 2021, when he was valued at $136 billion.
After a challenging year for his business, in which he owns the vast majority of his wealth, Zuckerberg’s net worth has increased.
Late in 2022, Meta announced the termination of 11,000 workers and a 41% decline in annual profit. The company’s virtual and augmented reality division, Reality Labs, reported its largest quarterly operating loss to date at $4.3 billion during the earnings call on Wednesday.
In addition, Meta reported fourth-quarter revenue down 4.5% from the same period the previous year, beating analyst expectations for a revenue decline of 6.5%.
This news, along with the company’s plan to repurchase $40 billion worth of stock, is likely what caused the stock to soar.
On Wednesday’s earnings call, Zuckerberg kept his gaze forward and referred to 2023 as the “year of efficiency” while also talking about generative AI.
The technology is exploding in the public eye thanks to companies like ChatGPT and the image generator Stable Diffusion, and it has caught the attention of rivals like Alphabet and Microsoft, the latter of which is a significant investor in the parent company of ChatGPT, OpenAI.
“When you’re still expanding that quickly, it’s very challenging to ever really crank up effectiveness,” Zuckerberg said during the call.
For a company that grew so quickly for the first 18 years of its existence, he said, “we’ve entered somewhat of a phase change.”
The company’s stock is still 51% below its September 2021 peak despite Thursday’s 23% stock increase, which was Meta’s largest daily percentage gain since July 2013.
However, Zuckerberg and his fellow big tech founders have had a successful week.
Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin of Alphabet all saw increases in wealth of over $4 billion on Thursday.
The Meta CEO also significantly outperformed Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who lost more than $60 billion in the previous week as a result of fraud allegations from short-seller Hindenburg Research, thanks to Thursday’s increase in net worth. (The allegations are refuted by Adani Group.)
A day after the Indian group’s flagship firm abandoned its $2.5 billion stock offering, Adani’s market losses reached over $100 billion on Thursday, raising concerns about a potential systemic impact.
The removal of Adani Enterprises from popular sustainability indices by S&P Dow Jones Indices, which will take effect on February 7, will present another challenge for Adani and make the stock less desirable to sustainability-focused funds.
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