Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the second richest person in the world, CNBC reports.
Zuckerberg’s net worth reached $206.2 billion on Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, surpassing the former Amazon CEO and chairman’s $205.1 billion net worth. The Facebook co-founder now trails Tesla boss Elon Musk by about $50 billion, the index showed.
With his 13% stake in Meta, Zuckerberg’s net worth has increased by $78 billion since the beginning of the year, which is more than any member of the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Index. Meta shares closed at an all-time high on Thursday at $582.77, representing a jump of approximately 68% since early January, when its shares were trading at $346.29.
Zuckerberg’s rise to second place on the index on Thursday underscores how his personal wealth has grown alongside investor enthusiasm for the social media giant’s rising profits this year.
Wall Street has continually applauded Meta throughout 2024, as the company has consistently reported quarterly earnings that have surpassed analyst estimates. In July, Meta said its second-quarter sales grew 22% to $39.07 billion, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue growth exceeding 20%.
Meta has pointed to its significant investments in artificial intelligence as one of the reasons for its sales growth, which has helped improve the performance of its online advertising platform. The company’s online advertising system suffered a major setback in 2021 when Apple introduced an iOS privacy update that weakened its ability to track users across the web. In February 2022, Meta said the privacy changes would cost it $10 billion in revenue.
At the end of 2022, Zuckerberg launched a major cost reduction plan that lasted until the following year and ended up causing the loss of employment of 21,000 Meta workers, that is, approximately a quarter of the company’s workforce. .
The greatest effort of the social network on safety issues for the little ones.
Investors reacted favorably to Meta’s cost reduction, while the company’s online advertising business began to recover and was bolstered by huge digital advertising investment campaigns from China-linked retailers Temu and Shein.
Although Meta has continued to spend billions of dollars on the virtual and augmented reality technologies needed to prop up the futuristic concept of the metaverse, investors have become more tolerant of the investments as long as the company’s core advertising business remains healthy. .
Last week, Meta unveiled its Orion augmented reality glasses, which garnered positive reviews from the few people who have tested the prototype.
This article was originally published in English on NBC News. click here to read it.