Other tech billionaires also fared badly, but none as significantly as the Facebook creator.
It’s been a very bad year to be Mark Zuckerberg.
The CEO of Meta Platforms Inc. (the technology company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) began 2022 with a net worth of $125.5 billion, which at the time made him the sixth-richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. But over the last nine months, Zuckerberg has lost a staggering $70.2 billion — more than half of what he was worth as of Jan. 1 — leaving him with $55.3 billion and the No. 20 spot on the list of the world’s richest people.
Of course, $55.3 billion is far from chump change, so Zuckerberg is doing just fine. But the decline in his personal wealth is notable as the most extreme example of how a tough year in tech took its toll on a number of famous founders. For instance, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the richest person on Earth, lost $2.55 billion since January, while Microsoft’s Bill Gates lost $26.2 billion and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos lost $44.4 billion — all eye-popping sums, to be sure, but significantly less than the $70 billion that disappeared from Zuckerberg’s net worth.
Facebook has been up against increasingly bad PR for years now, as the scandalous inner-workings of the company come to light and the disturbing effects of Instagram on its teen users become a bigger part of our cultural conversation. But it seems the company’s reputation is finally catching up to it financially, which is, in turn, hurting Zuckerberg’s wallet.
Meta had an especially difficult time back in February of this year, when the company reported the first-ever decline in the total number of Facebook users, which sent Facebook stock plunging and actually wiped out more than $30 billion of Zuckerberg’s net worth in a single day.
Another contributing factor to the company’s hardships is its work to build out the metaverse. Not only is the technology difficult for the average person to understand (though Katie did a great job explaining it for her podcast, Next Question), it’s also incredibly expensive. A financial filing from Meta declared that it spent $10 billion investing in the metaverse in 2021 and had more than 10,000 employees assigned to related projects, but Zuckerberg has admitted that work won’t be profitable for quite some time.
“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,” Zuckerberg said in May 2022.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s relevance is being seriously challenged by TikTok, which is exploding in growth as Meta’s own expansion has fallen to its slowest rate in about 10 years.
And while all of this is obviously hurting Zuckerberg’s finances, it’s also bad news for his team. The CEO told employees this summer that Meta would be hiring 30% fewer engineers than initially expected over the course of this year — and described the current climate by saying it could be “one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.”
