Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, Indian business tycoons, are now richer than the founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg after the latter faced stock loss due to the fall in Daily Active Users (DAUs) on Thursday.
Zuckerberg lost $29 million in net worth after Meta’s stock plunged by 26 percent. In total, his net worth is $85 billion, while Adani’s stands at $90.1 billion and Ambani’s is $90 billion.
According to AP, the decline could partly be tied to Meta’s spending on its Reality Labs segment – which includes its virtual reality headsets and augmented reality technology. Meta invested more than $10 billion in the segment in 2021.
In addition, recent privacy changes by Apple make it harder for companies like Meta to track people for advertising purposes, which also puts pressure on the company’s revenue.
On a conference call with analysts on Wednesday, Meta’s chief financial said the company faced a $10 billion “headwind” from Apple’s changes in 2022. Analysts at MoffettNathanson, in a note to clients, called the estimate “stunning.”
The dip in Meta’s stocks comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $35 billion single-day paper loss in November 2021, which had displaced him on Forbes’ list. Tesla’s shares have yet to recover from the sell-off that came after.
However, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Inc. saw a surge in holiday-quarter profits, according to a report from Reuters.
Bezos, who occupies the third spot in the Forbes list, made a set of insightful financial moves, such as investing in Rivian, an electric vehicle company, and hiking the annual prices of Amazon Prime subscriptions in the United States, which saw its shares shoot up by 15 percent in extended trading. This is set to be one of Amazon Inc.’s biggest percentage gains since October 2009.
Meta “finds itself in the middle of a perfect storm,” wrote Youssef Squali, an analyst at Truist Securities. Meta’s market cap as of Wednesday’s close stood at roughly $900 billion.
A report stated the intense competition and the revenue issues Meta is now facing are serious concerns. Michael Nathanson, an analyst at the brokerage Moffett Nathanson, questions the success of Facebook’s growth, saying that the damage caused is too deep and would be difficult to come out of it.
