Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook now Meta has his net worth fall by US$31billion as a result of a crash in his company’s shares.

The Facebook’s owner Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than US $230 billion in a record daily loss for a US firm. The company’s shares fell 26.4 percent.

According to Meta, Facebook’s daily active users (DAUs) also dropped for the first time in its 18-year history.

The drop in Mr Zuckerberg’s personal fortune is equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of a country like Estonia.

The crash came after Meta revealed that Facebook’s DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter.

Meta also warned of slowing revenue growth in the face of competition from rival platforms including TikTok and YouTube, while advertisers are also cutting spending.

Zuckerberg said “the firm’s sales growth had been hurt as audiences, especially younger users, had left for rivals.”

The firm forecast revenues of between $27bn and $29bn for the first quarter of this year, was lower than analysts have expected.

Although the company has been making investments in video services to compete with TikTok, owned by Chinese technology giant ByteDance, it makes less money from those offerings than its traditional Facebook and Instagram feeds. It’s clear that Meta is facing a whirlwind of different problems.

Issues About Transparency Policy

Last year, Apple brought in its App Tracking Transparency policy which allowed people to choose whether or not they want to be tracked around the internet by companies, like Meta, who can sell their information to advertisers. Unfortunately, the response was negative.

That is a major problem for Facebook, because they find information about you and sell it to advertisers is exactly how it makes its money. Its quarterly results showed advertising income falling, partly for this reason.

Meta’s rivals, like TikTok, are also attracting younger audiences, while Facebook user growth has stagnated around the world.

According to experts, Meta makes money from advertising. Yet the company’s name has been changed to mark a concept – the Metaverse – a thing that doesn’t exist yet and won’t do for years.

Mark Zuckerberg is committed to spending tens of billions of dollars on the project, even though evidence that people actually want to live their lives in virtual reality is scant. This means that many investors are unfriending.

Meta, which owns the world’s second largest digital advertising platform after Google, also said it has been hit by privacy changes on Apple’s operating system.

The changes, which make it harder for brands to target and measure their advertising on Facebook and Instagram, could have an impact “in the order of $10bn” for this year, the firm said.

Sachin Mittal, head of telecom and internet sector research at DBS Bank, said “Clearly Meta got more impacted compared to its rivals as other social media like Snap posted healthy results”.

“While there has been a broad negative impact on the whole tech sector, we reckon players with lower reliance on targeted ads or better algorithms to cope with Apple’s changes would still do well.”
Sachin Mittal

Meta’s share price slump also dragged on other social media platforms, including Twitter, Snap and Pinterest during the regular trading session.

However, Snap’s shares jumped by almost 60% in after-hours trade as it reported its first ever quarterly profit.