Yahoo Finance Facebook's slide costs Zuckerberg $15bn
Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook (FB), is on course to take a hit to personal wealth of about $15bn (£11bn) after the social media company lost nearly $120bn of its stock market value – the biggest fall faced by any US company in history.
The shares had tumbled in after-hours trading in the US on Wednesday and opened almost 20% lower on Thursday.
According to Bloomberg, the $120bn collapse in valuation is the biggest fall faced by any US company in history – but less than the $151bn feared during the deepest of the falls in overnight trading.
Facebook’s shares had closed at an all-time high of $217.50 on Wednesday before it posted results. At that price, Zuckerberg’s stake was worth $86.5bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index, below Microsoft’s Bill Gates ($96.7bn) and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($154bn).
After the results were issued, the shares started to fall and according to calculations by Bloomberg, he seems likely to fall to sixth from third on the Bloomberg billionaires list.
On a call after the results were issued, Zuckerberg reportedly said: “We are investing so much in security that it will have a significant impact on our profitability.”
The company has been questioned by US lawmakers about Russian interference in the American elections through its social media network. In the UK, the company is being fined £500,000, for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
On Wednesday it reported it had 2.2 billion monthly active users and while this is 11% higher than last year, it is the slowest growth in two years and below the level analysts had been excepting.
