Mark Zuckerberg’s assets increased to 201 billion USD in just 2 years, criticism about the virtual universe disappeared when Meta shares reached a record high

According to CNN, Mark Zuckerberg’s gamble on the virtual universe and changing the name of Facebook’s parent company to Meta seems to be paying off.

Initially, when Mark Zuckerberg drew the vision of the virtual universe and changed the company’s name to Meta, this founder’s assets evaporated by 100 billion USD along with doubts and criticism.

But now when Meta launched the AR Orion line of augmented reality glasses, its stock price has increased to a record level, causing Mark Zuckerberg’s total asset value to increase nearly 6 times in less than 2 years. year, reaching 201 billion USD.

This is the first time the Facebook boss’s assets have exceeded 200 billion USD and also erased the weak record of evaporating 100 billion USD in 2022.

Currently Mark Zuckerberg is the 4th richest person in the world after Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault.

The most successful billionaire of 2024

This year, although many billionaires have increased their assets, no one has been as successful as Mark Zuckerberg.

For example, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang doubled his assets to 106.2 billion USD, but still could not equal Meta boss when it increased to 73.4 billion USD from the beginning of the year until now. The main reason is thanks to the 60% price increase of Meta shares.

At the end of the trading session on September 25, 2024, Meta stock price was at a record high.

These are signs of success in complete contrast to 2022 when Mark Zuckerberg struggled with many difficulties. Facebook was slowing down before rival TikTok, losing its appeal to young people.

Then the fact that Meta poured too much money into the virtual universe but did not give worthy results, in addition to the scandals and lawsuits that affected Facebook’s image, made the situation even more tragic.

There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg’s assets dropped to only $35 billion.

Since 2022, Meta has had to cut tens of thousands of workers, equivalent to 25% of employees globally, to focus on “efficiency”. In addition, Meta also paid dividends for the first time and spent $50 billion to buy back shares from shareholders.

These positive moves, along with Meta gradually achieving some success in the virtual universe, have helped Mark Zuckerberg regain the trust of investors.

While the newly launched Orion glasses product pushed Meta stock prices to a record high in last week’s trading session, in fact this group has attracted investors’ expectations for many months thanks to its development projects. develop artificial intelligence (AI).

The prospect of the world’s largest social network, combining virtual universes and personal interactive AI technology, makes Wall Street extremely excited.

Please be reminded that Meta operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WahtsApp, extremely popular social media platforms with a high user base.

Even Mark Zuckerberg himself has affirmed that Meta’s AI technology will become the most used virtual assistant in the world in the future in the context that the company owns too much personal information of users.

“We have nearly 500 million users per month and haven’t even reached some other large markets (referring to some European countries),” Mark Zuckerberg said.

On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg also learned from previous US presidential elections before trying to stay away from politics, keeping Facebook a more fair and objective social networking platform, avoiding criticism. .

A series of these factors make many people even think that Mark Zuckerberg can completely usurp Elon Musk to become the richest person in the world.

Surpassing Elon Musk

Business Insider (BI) said that for the first time in history, Mark Zuckerberg could surpass Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to become the richest billionaire in the world in 2024.

As mentioned above, while Mark Zuckerberg’s assets increased by 73.4 billion USD from the beginning of the year until now, Elon Musk’s assets only increased by 19 billion USD and Jeff Bezos’s assets increased by 25 billion USD.

If at the beginning of 2024, the Facebook founder was only ranked 6th, he is now competing for 3rd place with Arnault, thereby showing a huge growth momentum in assets in 2024.

According to BI, although they are still some distance behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, thanks to the increase in technology stock prices, they can be quickly flattened.

Elon Musk himself only had $164 billion in April 2024, while Jeff Bezos was less than Mark Zuckerberg’s current assets at the beginning of January this year.

Therefore, it only takes a few sessions of Tesla and Amazon’s decline and Meta’s gain for Mark Zuckerberg to do something that has never happened before, which is to become the richest billionaire in the world.

BI newspaper said that although Meta, Tesla and Amazon are all technology stocks, while Mark Zuckerberg does not face many challenges, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are facing many problems, from antitrust investigations , personal lawsuits, poor business results reports and other troubles.

Any negative event can pull down Tesla and Amazon stock prices, thereby giving Mark Zuckerberg a chance to rise.

Another factor that can affect the position of the richest person in the world is that Mark Zuckerberg is only 40 years old, much younger than Elon Musk (53 years old) and Jeff Bezos (60 years old).

Therefore, Facebook founders have more time to build assets.

Currently, investors’ expectations for Mark Zuckerberg are huge as the founder limits indiscriminate spending on the virtual universe, instead tightening cost control by mass layoffs and pouring money into key technology areas such as artificial intelligence.

After an unexpectedly good second quarter 2024 earnings report, Mark Zuckerberg and chief financial officer Susan Li affirmed that AI has helped Meta grow faster than its competitors in the digital advertising market, which is the core business of the company.

CNBC news agency said that Meta’s revenue in the second quarter of 2024 grew by 22% over the same period last year, to 39.07 billion USD. Of which, about 98% of sales come from advertising and mainly on Facebook and Instagram.

This growth rate is twice as high as Google’s advertising revenue.

*Source: CNN, BI