How Mark Zuckerberg Lost $29 Billion In One Day

The founder of Facebook, Mark  Zuckerberg recently lost $29 billion in his net worth due to the record-breaking plunge of Meta shares last Thursday.

The 37-year-old who is currently worth $84.3 billion, according to Forbes, is not part of the top 10 richest people on earth for the first time since 2015.

Recall that Mark who owns a 13% per cent share of Meta first became a billionaire at 23 after the company was listed on the American stock exchange making him one of the youngest self-made Millionaire.

Before the recent rebrand from Facebook Inc to Meta, the social network company grew in size and acquired other social networks such as Instagram and Whatsapp. And as the founder and one of the highest shareholders of the company, Mark’s Wealth has continued to grow in line with the company’s growth.

The Company, however, experienced a record-breaking plunge last Thursday. According to a report by CNBC, the plunge was a result of the company warning its shareholders of weaker-than-expected revenue growth in the next quarter.  The company had also revealed that the recent privacy changes from Apple will cost the company $10 billion.

The 26% plunge was the company’s biggest plunge in a single day. The plunge also wiped more than $200 billion off of the company’s market cap.

Mark on his own part lost a total of  $29.8 billion, the second-largest single-day loss in history, surpassed only by the $35 billion that the world’s richest man Elon Musk lost in November after he tweeted about selling 10% of his Tesla stake.

Mark Zuckerberg had shocked the world late last year after revealing that the Social media Giant Company Facebook Inc changed its name to Meta. The company announced the name change at the Facebook Connect augmented and virtual reality conference.

The name change by Facebook was to signify a rebrand that focuses on building the “metaverse,” a shared virtual environment that is projected to be the successor to the mobile internet.

Prior to that the company’s platform, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, had experienced a  global shut down for close to six hours in the early days of October 2021.

The company later issued a statement confirming that the cause of the outage was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centres, which had a cascading effect, bringing all Facebook services to a halt.