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04th Feb 2022

Facebook company suffers $230bn wipeout in biggest plunge in stock market history

Danny Jones

Zuckin’ hell…

A staggering moment in stock market history has seen Facebook loses $230bn in stock – the biggest single-day wipeout ever – with shares in the Meta holding company dropping by 26.4 per cent.

As rumoured on Thursday, the historic plunge comes after the company reported its first-ever drop in daily users in its entire 18-year history on Wednesday. Moreover, significant funds were sunk into last year’s Meta rebrand and the company’s advertising model was hit hard by privacy changes at Apple – a perfect storm that is set to cost them billions.

It is even estimated to have lost $150bn of that grand total in a period of approximately five minutes.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself is also said to have recorded a $31bn drop in his net worth, also believed to be one of the biggest 24-hour drops in personal wealth ever. The crash saw him drop out of Forbe‘s top 10 rich list, though he is still ranked the 12th richest in the world.

Despite hoping to revolutionise and diversify the company by expanding into the virtual and augmented reality space with the Metaverse, the company’s fourth-quarter results suggest that it has still been outperformed by many of its social media competitors, the ByteDance-owned TikTok being one of them.

Recent events since the Metaverse launched certainly haven’t helped either, with reports such as a woman claiming she was “virtually gang-raped” in the augmented reality space meaning Facebook’s new look already has some scratches.

According to Bloomberg, during an investors call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg reportedly told his staff to focus on video content to try and gain on the competition but that he also appeared “red-eyed”, warning employees he might tear up because he “scratched his eye”.

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