Yahoo Finance Mark Zuckerberg loses billions as Meta drops out of the top 10 most valuable companies
Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, has dropped out of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies for the first time since 2015.
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant dropped 40 per cent after the company reported that Facebook’s daily user base shrank for the first time ever by one million users earlier this month.
The news destroyed $240 billion of market value for the company, the largest loss in US history, with Mr Zuckerberg himself losing $36 billion in net worth.
Mr Zuckerberg blamed competition from TikTok and YouTube. “The teams are executing quite well and the product is growing very quickly,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “The thing that is somewhat unique here is that TikTok is so big a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate.”
Since then, Meta’s share price dropped again by 13 per cent, dropping it to the 11th most valuable company in the world, before scraping back into the top 10 on Friday morning. It was previously the 6th most valuable.
At the top of the list is Apple and Microsoft, followed by oil company Aramco, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, and other technology giants like Nvidia, TSMC, and Tencent.
The news comes after Meta appointed former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg to a regulatory role that put him at the same level as Mr Zuckerberg.
Mr Clegg was recruited by Facebook in 2018 to be its head of global affairs after it was heavily criticised for its role in facilitating the spread of misinformation in the wake of the US presidential election.
“Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work”, Mr Zuckerberg said.
Since its renaming, Meta has promoted the metaverse – a virtual reality world that evangelists hope to be a mirror of our own – as the future of the internet. Unfortunately, users in the digital space have been harassed to the extent that they have received rape threats.
Critics have compared Meta’s lack of control to its inability to adequately moderate Facebook and Instagram. In response, Meta has said it is rolling out a ‘personal boundary’ setting that would stop avatars from getting too close to one another if enabled.
