Mark Zuckerberg loses $100 billion of his own personal fortune as Meta tanks

The Facebook founder has now officially lost more money than anyone else in the world in the past 13 months.

It’s been a rough 12 months for everyone’s wallets but nobody’s had a worse year than Mark Zuckerberg.

The Facebook founder, who now runs the rebranded platform called Meta, has lost the most amount of money than anyone else in the world in that period of time.

Analysis from Bloomberg found that Zuckerberg, 38, has endured “the single biggest hit” out of the globe’s billionaires.

At time of writing, the Silicon Valley executive holds a net worth of US$38.1 billion (A$58.7 billion).

While that’s a lot of money, it’s a stark figure when you consider that Zuckerberg’s fortune peaked at US$142 billion (A$220 billion) in September last year.

That represents a wipeout of more than US$100 billion (A$155 billion) in the last 13 months.

Zuckerberg’s grim year has been brought into sharp reality after his company announced its third quarter results.

Facebook-parent Meta reported Thursday (AEST) that its profit more than halved to US$4.4 billion (A$6.9 billion) in the third quarter from $9.2 billion a year earlier, which means they made US$4.8 billion (A$7.4 billion) less in that period than the year before.

Meta shares were down some 22 per cent to US$100.52 in response to the news. Over the past year, the price has plunged nearly 67 per cent, AFP reported.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse gamble has so far not paid off.

Meta has had a shocking quarter. Picture: Chris Delmas/AFP

Zuckerberg has copped criticism for his switch to the metaverse, a virtual reality world that he announced last year.

“I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment,” Zuckerberg said of it.

“While we continue to navigate some challenging dynamics – a volatile macro economy, increasing competition, ad signal loss and growing costs from our long term investments – I have to say that our product trends look better from what I see then some of the commentary I’ve seen suggests,” Zuckerberg told analysts on an earnings call.

The number of monthly active users at Facebook was up just two per cent to 2.96 billion at the end of September, Meta reported.

Before this year, Meta had never experienced a year where it didn’t increase its sales.

However, this year the tech giant has had two consecutive quarterly drops, and its revenue is down 4.5 per cent overall.

Zuckerberg holds around 350 million shares in Meta.

As a demonstration of his epic fall, there was a time when he was the third richest person in the world, behind only Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

At time of writing, he ranked 23rd.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has had a rough 12 months. Picture: Nicholas Kamm / AFP

Google parent Alphabet is also feeling the sting as tech companies struggle amid tough market conditions.

Alphabet had less earnings than expected in its quarterly earnings, also reported this week. The company’s ad revenue only grew six per cent.

TikTok is reportedly stealing ad revenue from Meta and Google.

Later on Friday (AEST), Apple and Amazon are also due to report their earnings

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors: “This week will go down in the history books of earnings season as one of Big Tech‘s worst and ultimately could be a ’fork in the road moment’ for the stalwarts looking ahead”.

— With AFP