TECH NEWS – Wow: the US Meta tech company (including Facebook, Instagram and Oculus) has lost a lot of value since it got a new name…

Mark Zuckerberg’s company (which, following the example of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is running under a different name than its most successful service) is not in a good position lately, as both Apple and Google have made privacy changes that affect Meta’s business model for tracking and personal data (because that’s how they try to sell us things). In February, the company already shed 30% of its share value on the stock market, and this could be just the beginning…

So, Meta’s tracking solutions can be prevented, but many people have turned their backs on the company’s platforms. There are other platforms (TikTok, owned by Chinese ByteDance, is one of them for the younger ones), so Facebook is not used so often, and who knows how much success they will have with the metaverse (especially if they can also have random ads targeted at us in it…).

According to the New York Mag, since Facebook’s parent company renamed itself Meta, the company’s value has dropped by $500 billion. That’s a lot of money, and the new name cannot be blamed as the only scapegoat: Zuckerberg is indeed taking the company in an unusual direction with his metaverse objectives, which might firmly be in the wild capitalist vein (again, we have to mention the advertising in brackets here; the metaverse regulation is still very much a Wild West category these days…).

A bit of context for how big a fall we can talk about. So far, Facebook/Meta was the sixth most prosperous company globally. Today, it is only 11th, having been overtaken by the likes of Tencent and Nvidia. While Meta has money to lose, they will have to tighten their belts at some point, and if the metaverse gamble doesn’t work, more problems could follow…

But this is truly music for the future.

Source: PCGamer