Let's get away from him a little Elon Musk, whose smiling face we see everywhere after the 44 billion he gave to get it Twitter, and let's go a little more post-universe further, where the Mark Zackerberg fights with his own billions to save it Facebook.
Last October, Zuckerberg announced very proudly and with great confidence that he "gives his all for metaverse" and that the project will cost more and more. He said it well, but the share of his company is in a dizzying and constant fall and he is forced to "pick it up".
So, yesterday, Wednesday 27 April, Zuckerberg said in the teleconference for the financial report of the first quarter of 2022 that Meta will "slow down the pace of some investments", due to "our growth rates".
You do not need to know financially to understand what this means, but a few numbers always help.
The bad news
Meta earnings for the first three months of the year were just $ 7,5 billion (yes "just"), 21% down from the corresponding period of 2021.
Revenue rose 7% to $ 27,9 billion, the slowest growth since the company went public. Thus, the targets for 2022 were necessarily reduced by 3 billion.
All this does not mean that Zuckerberg will stop investing in metaverse, he can no longer do it back: He still believes that the project will bring - finally - a revolution of the same scope as the invention of the wireless internet.
Reality Labs alone, the Meta-owned company that makes the Quest VR helmet and AR glasses, has about 17.000 employees and lost about $ 3 billion in the last four months.
The problem is, it's not enough to just believe it.
The very bad news
In these cases, the bad news always has to do with the investors whose money you spend (or waste) on when you are a listed company.
And Zuckerberg investors are turning anxiously about his level of investment (or waste), especially as any profit will long be seen in their pockets. Many years to be exact.
As in many similar cases, the story is told - without many words - by the share price. Meta's stock has not fallen. It has fallen by 50% since last October, when it was renamed, erasing the growth of the last five years.
That is, all the work done at the level of development for five years, turned into air in just six months. Perhaps, of course, Zuckerberg's public acknowledgment that he already spends $ 10 billion a year at Reality Labs and that he does not expect to see results before the end of the decade also helped.
For investors, the end of the decade could be the 34th century, as we live in an age where everything runs at the speed of light, money most of all.
And the worst news
Mark was also unlucky if there was such a thing in business. He chose to make the move at a time when his main job, social media living off ads, is going worse than ever.
And especially Facebook, which is now growing at a snail's pace, as young people abandon it for the sake of TikTok mainly, which devours users of both Facebook and Instagram.
Another unforeseen circumstance was Apple's move to ban ads from spotting you, something Facebook is crazy about. This alone has resulted in Meta losing about $ 10 billion in less than a year.
And as if all this were not enough, there is also the Competition Commission, Zuckerberg's nightmare, which forbade him to make other major acquisitions on social media, in order to restart the development process.
Facebook announced that in the last quarter of 2021, for the first time in its history, the number of its daily users dropped. By and large it managed to return the number to an upward trend for the first three months of 2022, but only by 4%, to 1,96 billion.
But the number of total users on all platforms controlled by Mark, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook rose slightly, from 2,82 billion to 2,87 billion.
Meta's share rose about 15% after Wednesday's announcement, but this will be temporary first and secondly mainly because expectations were low. At these sizes it is a very bad thing to lower expectations.
The perfect storm
Apple's move, the loss of Facebook users, the threat of TikTok, the concerns for the safety of users that are expressed more and more openly and more institutionally, and finally the changes in the behavior of users on social media, are the conditions which together create the "perfect storm" for the main theme of Meta: Advertising revenue.
The basic solution that Zuckerberg is working on is to copy TikTok. At Wednesday's teleconference, it announced that Reels, the Meta company that manages videos uploaded to platforms, now has 20% of Instagram content and about 50% of Facebook, in terms of how much time users spend on them. .
The next step will be to add ads to these videos.
The truth is that we still do not have to worry about Zuckerberg and his empire. He is also quite worried. The big bet for him is whether Metaverse will be able to bring him money in time, before Facebook collapses financially.
And to do that, the first giant in the history of social media would have to stay upright for a while and not even go down in history as something that really brought revolution, but could not stand the passage of time.
cnn.gr