Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has dropped out of the world's top 10 richest people, tumbling to 12th on Forbes' billionaire list after Thursday's fiasco on Wall Street.
It's a huge blow for Zuckerberg, who was in the top three as recently as November 2021.
Bloomberg has called it one of "the biggest one-day drops in wealth ever" after Meta fell short of its profit expectations. Zuckerberg lost as much as $31 billion and Facebook had its very first stagnation in history. Currently, the wealth of the big tech CEO is estimated to be $87.4 billion.
Meta only earned $10.29 billion, or $3.67 per share, on its revenue of $33.67 billion in the last three months of 2021, while analysts predicted earnings of $3.85 per share from $33.36 billion revenue.
In the last three months of 2021, Facebook lost around 500,000 daily users, with Meta also displaying rather modest growth across other platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Zuckerberg himself acknowledged that Facebook has to deal with something it never faced before: a strong rival like TikTok, that, according to his own words, "is so big a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate."
Additionally, Facebook is just several months into an ambitious rebranding to the "metaverse" – an augmented virtual reality world.