Meta Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerberg has lost his spot in the list of top 10 richest men in the United States for the first time since 2015, following the astonishing stock price drop in his company in the past year.
This was announced when Forbes released the 41st edition of its list of 400 America’s richest people.
The 38-year-old tech titan lost over half of his fortune ($76.8 billion) since September 2021 dropping him from the third richest man in the US to the 11th on the list now worth $57.7 billion, according to the new list released by Forbes on Tuesday.
The company, which has seen its stock price drop 38 percent in the last six months, has also faced increased government scrutiny on many fronts including an FTC antitrust investigation of Zuckerberg’s company.
According to Forbes, he has the cratering stock price of Meta to thank for his exit from the top 10.
The company shares have plunged 57% since last year’s Forbes 400, which used stock prices from September 3, 2021. Tech stocks are generally 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.
Following the privacy policy update from Apple last year that made it harder for tech companies to track users across apps, impacting Meta’s ad sales, Mark Zgutowicz, an analyst at the research and investment banking firm Benchmark said.
“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 means that advertisers are having trouble telling whether a campaign was successful or not,” Zgutowicz stated.
In October 2021, Facebook officially became Meta, since then, their reality labs division has lost $10 billion in 2021, the company announced earlier in the year during its earnings call.
While the metaverse is all Zuckerberg wants to talk about, investors are less enthusiastic so far. “It’s a long tail investment and, for now, it’s kind of a cash suck,” Zgutowicz says.
Compounding Meta’s problems is the lucrative use of TikTok by Gen Z and Millenials, luring away advertisers, from Meta’s Instagram and Facebook.
In February, Meta announced its first-ever quarterly loss of daily active users. An internal report showed that Meta’s TikTok clone, Instagram Reels, is struggling to compete, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Zuckerberg first became a billionaire in 2008 at the age of 23 becoming the youngest self-made billionaire at that time, just four years after founding Facebook. He debuted on the list at No. 321, worth $1.5 billion. By 2011, his net worth had increased nearly 12 fold to $17.5 billion.
On the new Forbes 400 list, Elon Musk, worth $251 billion reigns supreme, followed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, worth $151 billion and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, worth $106 billion compete in the top 3.
Software tycoon Larry Ellison sits at number four with $101 million, just above investor Warren Buffet at $97 billion.
Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who also saw their net worth drop, take the fourth and fifth spots. Ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer sits at number eight with a worth of $83 billion.
Other than the Tesla CEO, the only other person in the top ten to see their fortune increase is Michael Bloomberg.
The youngest son of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, Jim Walton, rounds out the top ten with a worth of $57.9 billion.
