Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than $230B last week. A record daily loss for a US firm. Its shares fell 26.4% after quarterly figures disappointed investors. Meta also said that Facebook‘s daily active users (DAUs) had dropped for the first time in its 18-year history and fell to 1.929B in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930B in the previous quarter. The Chinese TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance Ltd, is giving Meta a hard time. Is the Chinese social media age now upon us?
According to Cloudflare, TikTok surpassed Google as the most popular website in 2021. It’s no secret that Chinese culture is very advantageous for accessing social media. WeChat has also been superior to the meta-subsidiary WhatsApp for years and has integrated a payment system, for example. In addition, there is a huge home market with more than 1.4 billion consumers. TikTok really seems to herald the dawn of the Chinese age.
Meta’s share price slide saw chief executive Mark Zuckerberg‘s net worth fall by $31bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The drop in Zuckerberg’s personal fortune was equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of Estonia.
Even after that drop, Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of almost $90bn, which means he is still one of the richest people in the world.
