(Headline USA) Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bounty of wealth took a huge hit in 2022, plunging nearly $71 billion and knocking him down to the 20th richest person in the world rankings.
Zuckerberg started September, 2021, with a net worth estimated at $142 billion. It has since tumbled to $55.3 billion, accompanied by stock hits, according to the Daily Mail. Concurrent to Zuckerberg’s drop, his Meta brainchild Facebook spawn has also tanked.
The large majority of Zuckerberg’s wealth is anchored by Meta stock, which has dropped 57% this year, badly underperforming versus peers like Apple, Amazon and Google, according to Bloomberg. In total, Meta’s net income dropped to $3 billion in the second quarter, a fall of 36%.
Zuckerberg acknowledged the company’s financial struggles in a May shareholder meeting but downplayed concerns.
“The metaverse business for us isn’t really going to be a meaningful contributor to the business until, at a minimum, much later in this decade, and probably realistically, this decade is going to be about setting the foundation for that and then the 2030s are really where this is going to contribute a lot to the profits of this company,” he claimed.
Almost all of Zuckerberg’s wealth is tied up in Meta stock. He holds more than 350 million shares, according to the company.
The drop comes amidst Zuckerberg’s attempts to reshape Facebook into a “metaverse” company. The rebrand launched in October 2021, and almost immediately afterward the number of users began to decline on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus.
Accusations of censorship also hurt Zuckerberg’s brand. He recently admitted during an interview with Joe Rogan that he agreed to suppress the bombshell New York Post report on Hunter Biden at the behest of the FBI, saying the agency had warned him about potential “Russian disinformation” right before the report dropped.
“I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us,” Zuckerberg said of the agency’s 2020 election tinkering. Agents told “some folks on our team” that ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert.’”
“There was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s going to be similar to that,” Zuckerberg said of the FBI’s directives.
