For the first time in 7 years, Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg fail to make the list of the top 10 richest people in America.
His omission from the list comes after his company witnessed an astonishing stock price drop in the past year.
The 38-year-old Facebook founder has so far lost a staggering $76.8 billion since September 2021, dropping him from the number 3 position on the Forbes 400 list of the U.S.’ wealthiest people to the 11th rank.
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He currently has a net worth of $57.7 billion on this year’s list, and the fortune calculation has been done based on the stock prices from September 2nd, 2022, according to Forbes.
Over the past year, no one in America has lost as much money as Mark Zuckerberg. Forbes states that the billionaire has the cratering stock price of Meta (formerly Facebook) to thank for his exit from the top 10 richest list.
The company’s shares have plunged 57% since last year’s Forbes 400 list’s revelation, which used stock prices from September 3, 2021, for its calculation.
Even in general, tech stocks are in a slump with the market downturn, but Meta’s fall outpaces both the Nasdaq (-9.8%) and the S&P 500 (-13.5%), as well as Microsoft’s 14% decline, Google-parent Alphabet‘s 25% drop, and Amazon’s 27% dive, the report mentioned.
As far as revenue is concerned, Meta reported its first-ever quarterly revenue decline in July 2022, a 1% drop to $28.8 billion.
The newly published Forbes list sees, Tesla CEO Elon Musk occupying the first position with a net worth of ($251 Billion), followed by Jeff Bezos ($151 Billion), Bill Gates ($106 Billion), Larry Ellison ($101 Billion), and Warren Buffett ($97 Billion) as the richest Americans, rank-wise sitting in the top five spots.
Mark Zuckerberg reportedly became a billionaire in 2008 for the first time, which was just four years after he founded Facebook. He was the youngest self-made billionaire at the time, debuting at 321 on the Forbes 400 list with a net worth of $1.5 billion at the age of 23.
By the year 2011, Zuckerberg’s net worth had increased nearly 12-fold to $17.5 billion, and this recent slump that pushed him out of the top 10 this year isn’t the first time Zuckerberg’s net worth has taken a dive.
After Facebook’s famously disappointing IPO in 2012, Zuckerberg fell from 14th rank to 36th rank in The Forbes 400, the Forbes report mentioned. But the following year, he bounced back, and up until now, his fortune has continued to climb.
A privacy policy tweak from Apple last year that made it more difficult for tech companies to monitor users across applications had an effect on Meta’s ad sales which alarmed investors. With a 1% reduction to $28.8 billion, Meta disclosed its first-ever quarterly sales fall in July.
According to an analyst at research and investment banking firm Benchmark, he disclosed that Facebook makes most of its money from advertising, and now it just doesn’t have that data anymore. All those data signals went away, which basically means that advertisers are having trouble telling whether a campaign was successful or not.