His net worth has dropped by 4.4%.
On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is planning to make changes to the algorithm that determines the order of content on users’ news feeds.
The changes will mean that our timelines will be less saturated by posts from media organisations and celebrities.
However, following the public statement, the social media site’s shares plummeted and Zuckerberg lost $3.3bn of his personal fortune. He is now worth a measly $72.4bn (£52.7bn). Poor him.
Zuckerberg, 33, started Facebook in 2004 and still owns 17% of the company.
Explaining the coming changes in a Facebook post, he wrote:
“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us,” he said. “But recently we’ve gotten feedback that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”
It has been suggested that the changes were influenced by worries about “context collapse” – the phenomenon of people sharing less and less about their personal lives online. Facebook are affected by this as it means they have less useful data for advertisers.
While Mark Zuckerberg has taken a personal financial hit as a result of the plans, it is thought that the changes will increase Facebook’s commercial value in the long run.
Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC, told Bloomberg: “Making the feed more relevant should boost user and engagement growth over time.”
