Mark Zuckerberg lost more than half his net worth this year as Meta struggles

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has seen his net worth slashed by more than $100 billion this year, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, as Meta, Facebook’s parent company, faces investor pessimism about its future growth trajectory.

The 38-year-old is now worth approximately $36 billion. By comparison, heading into Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was worth $211 billion, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was worth $139 billion, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was worth $110 billion, per Bloomberg data.

Meta shares were down as much as 22% in Thursday trading, making the company worth approximately $271 billion. Zuckerberg owns nearly 367 million Meta shares, according to the data website Whale Wisdom. That amounts to about 13.5% of all its outstanding stock.

Meta reported earnings Wednesday evening that fell short of analysts’ expectations, with multiple Wall Street analysts issuing downgrades. The company faces increasing competition from other social media platforms like TikTok, as well as skepticism about its investment in the Metaverse, a virtual world environment that Zuckerberg has said represents the future of the internet.

“We think Meta’s latest results … are thesis changing and likely to weigh on the shares for some period,” Morgan Stanley said in a note to clients Wednesday.

Zuckerberg once held the title of world’s youngest self-made billionaire. In 2008, at age 23, he helped take Facebook public.

His net worth reached a height of $142 billion in September 2021, Bloomberg reported. While many other billionaires have seen their own net worth decline in subsequent months alongside broad stock market declines, Bloomberg said Zuckerberg has seen the single-biggest hit among those on the wealth list.