Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Has Increased by $11 Billion. The Biggest One-Day Increase was on Thursday.
Mark Zuckerberg is having the best day of his life. At least when it comes to his personal wealth.
On Thursday, Meta Platforms Inc. stock soared 17.6% after the company announced that its flagship social-media network, Facebook, added more users than expected in the first quarter. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, this increased its 37-year-old chief executive officer’s fortune by $11 billion, the largest one-day boost he’s ever experienced.
Zuckerberg’s massive fortune gain propelled him up to
Source: Computer Weekly
six slots in the Bloomberg ranking to 12th place, passing Carlos Slim and Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton.
Facebook’s recent user increase is a dramatic contrast to Meta, which saw its first-ever user loss in the final three months of 2021. The rise in the stock price indicates that investors are less concerned about the company’s future growth prospects in comparison to competitors.
Meta’s stock is still down 39 percent this year, despite Thursday’s rally. In the first four months of 2022, Zuckerberg’s fortune dropped by $49.6 billion, more than any of the other 20 biggest billionaires.
On Thursday morning, shares of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. soared as much as 19 percent after the company reported that its main platform added more users than expected in the first quarter, allaying fears that the company is losing steam as a new generation flocks to younger sites like TikTok.
Meta announced on Wednesday that its primary platform has 1.96 billion daily users, a return to growth following the first-ever fall in the December quarter. Analysts had predicted a total of $1.94 billion.
Revenue increased 6.6 percent to $27.9 billion during the time, and would have been greater if not for the conflict in Ukraine, according to the business. The stock had plunged nearly 50% this year as investors became increasingly concerned that Meta’s major source of revenue and profit — advertising in magazines — was in jeopardy.
Those fears appear to have been allayed — at least for the time being — since Facebook just added 31 million new daily active users. Many of Meta’s problems still exist. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has admitted that TikTok, a video-sharing app owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd., is a significant competitor for young users’ attention.
The results were “low drama,” according to Tom Champion, an analyst at Piper Sandler who rates the stock neutral, and while the expectation for about flat sales growth in the second quarter “would have been unfathomable a year ago,” it was better than the market feared.
The stock soared to a high of $208.20 per share, the most intraday gain since July 2013.
