After a whistleblower came forward and outages brought Facebook Inc.’s major products offline, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal worth dropped by more than $6 billion in a matter of hours, putting him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people.
The shares of the social media giant fell 4.9 percent on Monday, extending a slide of almost 15 percent since mid-September.
The stock market’s decline on Monday reduced Zuckerberg’s net worth to $121.6 billion, putting him behind Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at No. 5. According to the index, he has lost about $140 billion in a few of weeks.
The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories on Sept. 13 based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook was aware of a wide range of issues with its products – such as Instagram’s negative impact on teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots – while downplaying the issues in public. The reports drew the attention of government officials, and the whistleblower came forward on Monday.
Facebook has responded by emphasising that the difficulties confronting its products, such as political divisiveness, are complex and not just due to technological factors.
“I think it gives people comfort to imagine there must be a technological or technical explanation for the difficulties of political polarisation in the United States,” Facebook’s vice president of global relations, Nick Clegg, told CNN.
The Chenab Times News Desk