Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has lost more than half a trillion dollars in market value since its August 2021 peak. Half of that vaporized in a single day, the biggest drop ever in the global stock exchange history. Once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, Meta has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent.
Mark Zuckerberg, who has openly courted comparisons to the Roman emperor Augustus, is now a disgraced lame duck. Or at least it seems so. The New York Intelligencer remarked that this is “an ignominious fall from a rarefied group of world-dominating companies.” According to The Wall Street Journal, the Meta fallout has been so severe that advertisers are shifting their ad budgets to Google since Facebook is no longer profitable.
According to Forbes, the 37-year-old tech Mark Zuckerberg is worth about $74 billion. And Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, still made $39 billion in profit in 2021. But, according to its projections, the company’s profits will shrink for the foreseeable future as it sinks more money into developing the metaverse.
The future is still the future, and no one knows today if the metaverse vision will not work. We would not place any bets on it. There is also the fact that Meta is also facing an antitrust lawsuit in the U.S. from the FTC and may have to spin off WhatsApp or Instagram. There is a time for everything. And Mark Zuckerberg has had his. Now comes the Chinese Age of Social Media with TikTok.
