Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world's second-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. With his 13% stake in Meta, Zuckerberg's fortune is set to grow by $78 billion by 2024, more than any member of the 500 richest people tracked by the index.
Zuckerberg's net worth reached $206,2 billion on Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, surpassing the $205,1 billion of former Amazon CEO and chairman Jeff Bezos. The Facebook co-founder now trails Tesla chief Elon Musk by about $50 billion, the index showed.
Shares of Meta closed at a record high on Thursday at $582,77, a jump of about 68% since early January, when its shares were trading at $346,29. Mr Facebook's rise to second place on the index on Thursday highlights how his personal wealth has grown alongside investor excitement over the social media giant's rising profits this year.
Wall Street continues to cheer Meta throughout 2024 as the company reported solid quarterly earnings that beat analysts' estimates. In July, Meta said its second-quarter sales rose 22 percent to $39,07 billion, marking its fourth straight quarter of revenue growth of more than 20 percent.
Meta has pointed to its massive investments in artificial intelligence helping to improve the performance of its online advertising platform as a reason for its sales growth. 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 on the web. Meta in February 2022 said privacy changes would cost it $10 billion in revenue.
At the end of 2022, Zuckerberg embarked on a major cost-cutting plan that extended into the following year and ultimately resulted in 21.000 Meta employees losing their jobs, roughly a quarter of the company's workforce.
Investors reacted favorably to Meta's cost-cutting, while the company's online advertising began to recover, boosted by huge digital ad spending campaigns from China-linked retailers Temu and Shien. While Meta has continued to spend billions of dollars on the virtual and augmented reality technologies needed to support its futuristic metaverse concept, investors have become more tolerant of investments as long as the company's core advertising business remains healthy.
Last week, Meta introduced the Orion AR glasses, which received positive reviews from the few people who have tried the prototype.
Source: newsbomb.gr
