The price of Meta shares dropped more than 25% at the start of trading in the US on Thursday, after it revealed during an earnings call that Facebook saw its first-ever decline in daily active users. When the markets closed, Meta’s market value had dropped by $230 billion, the biggest one-day loss ever by a US company.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally lost $29 billion in net worth, and according to Forbes dropped out of the top 10 richest people in the world list for the first time since 2015.
Meta is the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Meta Quest, formerly known as Oculus.
Facebook announced earlier that it lost 1 million daily users in North America in Q4 2021, leading to an overall decrease in daily active users globally. A company spokesperson has confirmed that it is the first-ever decline of user base in Facebook’s history.
Facebook has struggled with relevance among young people, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot towards the metaverse and mixed reality plans have not yet yielded results. The website has also been hit by changes Apple made to its privacy policy, making it more difficult to track iOS rules.
Meta CFO David Wehner has said that Apple’s iOS tracking changes have likely cost Meta more than $10 billion in sales.
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Despite the decline in user base and the share price drop, Meta still reported over $40 billion in profit for 2021. However, it also reported losses in billions for the Reality Labs division, which handles AR/VR hardware and software, and the company’s metaverse related efforts.
Mark Zuckerberg has said that he intends to ramp up spending on Reality Labs, and sees a combination of AR and VR as the future of computing.