Mark Zuckerberg lost $70 billion in 2022 after the Metaverse

A month after reaching a fortune of $142 billion, Mark Zuckerberg launched Meta and made several announcements about augmented reality and virtual reality (metaverse) in 2022. Then, Zuckerberg lost about $71 billion of his fortune in 2022. Experts believe that this decline is due to his new virtual adventure.

While many people are making money in the metaverse sector, it seems that Mark Zuckerberg’s foray has cost him some of his fortune. This is despite Facebook’s venture into AR and VR products and its name change to Meta, while the entire tech space in the U.S. is having a rough year.

In 2022 alone, the personal worth of Facebook’s founder, meanwhile renamed Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, suffered a $71 billion drop. As Bloomberg reports, this reduction is the highest ever suffered by a billionaire.

This fall suffered by Zuckerberg is not only due to the natural volatility of the market, but also to his intentions towards the metaverse. Last year, the Facebook founder announced that his company would now focus on building and developing the metaverse. The announcement was accompanied by a rebranding of the brand that had previously been called Facebook and sparked a wave of interest in the concept.

Metaverse, other companies benefit from it

The metaverse embodies the future of the social network, according to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg in 2021:

“My hope is that in about five years (…) people will see us primarily as a metaverse company,” he said in an interview with the trade site The Verge.

Currently, Mark Zuckerberg is ranked 20th in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index after losing half his fortune in 2022. The data shows that he is now worth $55.3 billion. If, on the one hand, there are companies that benefit from the metaverse. On the other hand, there is Meta itself, whose change does not give significant results.

Figures released by Meta earlier this year showed that in the last quarter of 2021 alone. The company lost $10 billion due to its attempts to build the metaverse. More than that, the quarterly results showed that Facebook, the company’s flagship product, was losing users for the first time in its 18-year history.

Last year, Facebook’s founder dropped 14 spots on Bloomberg’s list of millionaires and is now in 20th place. It is spot that he hasn’t held since 2014. According to the TV channel’s experts, this misfortune is due “in large part to the company’s virtual reality adventure.”