Almost two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had rebranded itself to Meta.
The renaming reflected the decision to invest heavily in the Metaversum business.
The meta stock, which accounts for most of Zuckerberg’s fortune, initially plummeted but has since recovered.
We’re currently testing machine translations of articles by our US colleagues at Insider. This article has been automatically translated and checked by a real editor. We welcome feedback at the end of the article.
It’s been almost two years since Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook to Meta has renamedto highlight his company’s foray into the so-called metaverse.
Since then, his fortune — which is almost entirely tied up in his 13 percent stake in Meta — has at times fallen in sync with the company’s stock price. He has largely recovered in recent months.
Sea Bloomberg Billionaires Index Zuckerberg was worth $118 billion as of October 28, 2021, the day the Meta name change was announced.
As of Friday morning, his net worth was about $96.5 billion, according to Business Insider, based on the Bloomberg index.
But even factoring in recent gains, that translates to a loss of almost $22 billion on paper in the nearly two years since the name change was announced. Zuckerberg’s net worth has recovered from a low of about $37 billion in October 2022, the one-year anniversary of Meta’s rebranding.
Meta shares plunged late last year after the company reported third-quarter earnings that fell short of expectations. That came a few months after a lackluster earnings report that included the first User decline in the history of Facebook reported and a depreciation of hundreds of millions.
While the company’s stock has rebounded in the first six months of this year, it’s been a chaotic 2023, with massive layoffs across the tech industry, and at Meta in particular, along with a slew of issues with regulators and academics, as well as additional competition since Apple recently unveiled its competitor on Zuckerberg’s prized virtual reality headsets.
Notably, when unveiling the Vision Pro headset, Apple executives never once used the word “Metaverse” to distance themselves from the world of virtual real estate that Zuckerberg once believed to be the future and is common to many did not resonate with consumers.
a report from The Verge According to Zuckerberg, in a company-wide meeting Thursday, he criticized the Apple headset and drew a comparison between the Vision Pro and Meta’s own Quest headset, including the fact that many users in Apple’s demos were stationary and working alone, while Zuckerberg reportedly told employees that Meta wanted to emphasize the collaboration and coexistence of people in virtual reality.
read too
Meta also seems willing to take more risks this year. Reports last month suggest the company has been testing a release date for its Instagram-based Twitter competitor, which has been described as “Instagram for your thoughts.”
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s wealth peaked at $142 billion in September 2021, according to the Bloomberg ranking, placing him among the richest people in the world.
The tech CEO spent part of the last year well outside the top 20 due to the massive decline in Meta stock, but recently he’s back in the top 10 richest people in the world. He’s still well behind No. 1 Elon Musk and No. 2 Bernard Arnault, both of which are near $200 billion.
Read the original article in English here.