Mark Zuckerberg has more than one reason to cover his eyes as Facebook shares suffer a historic selloff in trading Thursday. The Facebook founder’s personal net worth dropped approximately $29.4 billion on Thursday, according to Forbes’ real-time calculations. As of midday, Zuckerberg’s on-paper fortune was estimated to be $85.1 billion, knocking him out of the top 10 among the world’s richest individuals. Shares of the Facebook parent Meta were down more than 26% to $238.04 in midday trading after the social media giant reported the first quarterly decline in its user base in company history. If the stock plunge holds, the company will lose more than $200 billion in market value in a single day – one of the worst declines on record within US markets. Facebook reported 1.929 billion daily users in the fourth quarter, down from 1.93 billion users the previous quarter. The unprecedented decline in Facebook’s average daily users headlined a weaker-than-expected earnings report. Zuckerberg blamed the downtick in user activity in part on increased competition from rival platforms such as TikTok. “People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” Zuckerberg said during an earnings call on Wednesday afternoon. Meta topped expectations for revenue with $33.67 billion in fourth-quarter sales, but missed the mark on earnings. The company’s Reality Labs division — the segment responsible for building its version of the so-called “metaverse” — lost more than $10 billion in fiscal 2021 as Meta ramped up investments. Zuckerberg told investors the company’s vision for a fully realized metaverse is “still a ways off,” though he expressed optimism about its eventual impact on Meta’s business. “I’m pleased with the momentum and the progress that we’ve made so far and I’m confident these are the right investments for us to focus on going forward,” Zuckerberg added.
