In a brutal week for tech stocks, Zuckerberg saw his largest one-day swing in personal valuation yet recorded.
The heady fortune’s of America’s tech billionaires make for avid reading for most news followers.
One day, you have Amazon’s (AMZN) – Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report Jeff Bezos at the top of the ranking of the world’s wealthiest people. The next, he is bumped down a few pegs by Tesla’s (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report Elon Musk.
The game of musical chairs that involves these vaunted few is followed with breathless anticipation by both their fans, who hope to have similar fortunes someday, and their haters, who find the idea of billionaires in this day and age to be completely ludicrous.
Either way, it makes for some compelling reading.
This week was a particularly brutal game of fortunes for the world’s richest people, after tech took a brutal beating in the market following dismal earnings reports in the first quarter.
That sent Amazon, Google (GOOGL) – Get Alphabet Inc. Class A Report and Apple (AAPL) – Get Apple Inc. Report stocks skidding, while Facebook (MVRS) – Get Meta Report enjoyed a reprieve from its previously sharp nosedive in share value.
Even Elon Musk felt the pinch, although that was mostly due to Tesla shareholders registering their opposition to Musk’s Twitter (TWTR) – Get Twitter, Inc. Report buyout — a venture which he may or may not be serious about.
One big winner in all of this? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Shutterstock/TheStreet
A Really Big Payday
Zuckerberg is known for having incredibly high highs (like connecting the entire world to people they knew in primary school) and incredibly low lows (like when Cambridge Analytica said it had scraped the data of millions of unsuspecting Facebook users).
This week, however, Zuckerberg had a high.
In one day alone, April 27, he made $11 billion, the largest one-day gain he has ever had in his fortune.
It is his largest one-day swing in personal valuation yet recorded. by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which charts the individual valuations of the uber-rich.
The gain was tied to a leap in Facebook’s share price after the company said its user base was growing.
Given the almost uniformly terrible news reported by other tech giants this week, Facebook’s estimate of zero growth in 2023 and a loss of $3 billion on its alternate reality metaverse seemed positively minor.
Investors rewarded Facebook’s good news by ploughing billions into the stock, which in turned buoyed Zuckerberg up a full six places on the index.
While he began April 27 at spot number 18, he ended the day in the number 12 spot, easily within the world’s richest dozen people. He held onto the spot at the end of the week, as Meta weathered Friday’s market slump better than many companies.
Still, even with those gains, Zuckerberg wealth has plummeted almost 40% since the beginning of the year.
Bloomberg reports that it the biggest swing downward of any of its remaining top two dozen or so billionaires.
