Facebook Founder and Meta Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has nose-dived by more than 50 percent this year, losing over $70 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has plummeted very hard this year amid huge investments in the metaverse.
In April 2021, Facebook said it had spent around $10 billion on metaverse investments while more than 10,000 people are working on its metaverse projects.
According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, Zuckerberg started 2022 with a fortune of $125 billion but has since fallen by 55 percent to $55.3 billion this year.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook started in 2021 with a lot of enthusiasm and hope. In 2021, Facebook was rebranded to Meta as the parent company while Mark disclosed that Facebook will invest heavily in Metaverse.
Facebook however steeped in controversy with Frances Haugen’s leaked information. At the end of the 2021 financial year, the company reported its first-ever decline in users.
Mark Zuckerberg lost in 2022 so far which stands at $70 billion is four times the net worth of Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote. Aliko Dangote is worth $18.8 billion according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
Zuckerberg’s net worth of $55.3 billion placed him at number 20 on the billionaire index, far below Elon Musk’s net worth estimated at $268 billion.
The 38-year-old billionaire, who also doubled as the owner of WhatsApp, Instagram and Occult, however believed that the company’s investment in the metaverse space will be worth it in the near future.
“The metaverse business for us isn’t really going to be a meaningful contributor to the business until at a minimum much later in this decade, and probably realistically this decade is going to be about setting the foundation for that and then the 2030s are really where this is going to contribute a lot to the profits of this company,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May.