Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg lost billions of dollars in stock wealth. He lost more than $15 billion on Tuesday after investors dumped their shares.
The massive loss ripped him out of the top five richest men list according to Forbes. He now trails Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ($149 billion), Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ($95 billion), LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault ($84 billion), Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett ($83 billion) and Amancio Ortega ($72 billion), founder of retailing group Inditex. Mark Zuckerberg lost billions and now as a net worth of $67 billion.
According to Bloomberg, it was Facebook‘s largest stock-drop ever. It was also the biggest stock market wipeout for a US company. Facebook’s collapse was a 19 per cent plunge in share price. It erased about $100 billion of its market value on Thursday. This loss is also more than the total value of many of America’s best-known companies. This loss eclipses the total value of warehouse club Costco, drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb, investment powerhouse Goldman Sachs, defence contractor Lockheed Martin and credit-card company American Express, according to Bloomberg data. The wealth destroyed also is more than the total value of farm equipment maker Caterpillar, home-improvement retailer Lowe’s, coffee seller Starbucks and drugstore chain CVS. To give the loss even more perspective, Gary Kaltbaum, president of Kaltbaum Capital Management, said, “Facebook lost more than Ford and General Motors (market cap) combined.”
In March, Facebook was caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal over privacy issues related to its users, but its shares recovered after a brief drop of more than 15 per cent. What investors see as downside could benefit Facebook users and Facebook in the long run. Facebook has gotten a bad rap for being too lax in safeguarding people’s private information. It failed to monitor and stop bad behaviour on the platform. It also let misinformation run amok. Now it’s owning up to those problems and it’s spending a lot of money to fix them. Facebook also said Wednesday that part of the reason revenue growth will slow is that Facebook is giving its users greater control over the privacy of their data. This will undercut Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities.
