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Zuckerberg loses $6 billion in hours as Facebook nosedive
- Drops to No. 5 on world’s richest list
- Stock plunge knocks his net worth down to $121.6 billion
Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by more than $6 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.
A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
Zuckerberg is now the world’s sixth richest person after his fortune declined to $121.6 billion in total.
Facebook stock came under pressure from two fronts: an unusually long outage of its namesake platform, Instagram and WhatsApp, a mistake likely costing the company tens of millions of dollars in revenue. (In the latest quarter, it brought in around $330 million a day in sales.)
Facebook last suffered a blackout like this in 2019, when the network shut down for 14 hours. A decade earlier, in 2008, it went dark for a day.
Monday’s outage affected internal systems at Facebook, too, making it impossible for employees to access emails, the internal messaging system known as Workplace, even reportedly some doors at company headquarters.
The other matter weighing on Facebook is Tuesday’s Congressional hearing, where a former product manager, Frances Haugen, will testify about her decision to become a whistleblower and leak internal data to the Wall Street Journal.
In a 60 Minutes interview last night, she criticzed Facebook for putting “profits over people” and failing to maintain safeguards against misinformation after the 2020 presidential election.
But Facebook stock has proven surprisingly durable over the past few years of scandals, including last year’s ad boycott and the January 6th riots.
Shares remain near record highs, closing Monday at $326, a more than 150% increase in five years.
