However, the 21,000 people who lost their jobs at Meta, Zuckerberg’s company, are probably not very happy about it.

Zuck has achieved a lot in the tech industry over the past two decades, and recently the Meta CEO scored another victory by becoming the second richest man in the world with a fortune of $206 billion. This puts him ahead of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who made a staggering fortune, and only Elon Musk has a larger sum ($256 billion, although he lost nearly $6 billion in his latest results, while Zuck gained $3.43 billion).

In 2022, Meta was not in a very bright position, as Zuck’s company went into a downturn after the pandemic. The company’s social networking platform, Facebook, lost its daily active users for the first time in 17 years, and Meta’s stock price fell 24%, wiping $200 billion off its value. Since then, the stock has rebounded: from $90 per share in November 2022, it now sells for $583. The stock’s value has increased 64% in the last year alone, which is no small feat. And Zuck’s fortune hasn’t grown by accident; he owns 13% of Meta, so when the company goes up, he benefits.

In Bloomberg’s top ten billionaires, Zuckerberg is by far the leader in terms of his performance over the past twelve months, with a $78.1 billion increase in wealth over that period. He even outperformed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (+$63.5 billion), who has a strong track record thanks to his advanced artificial intelligence hardware.

But there is a downside. Despite the improvement in Meta’s situation, 21,000 people lost their jobs at the bottom. Although investors welcomed the layoffs as a way to cut costs, the stock was a positive on the stock market. Meta has posted better-than-expected sales this year and is also focusing on generative artificial intelligence.

Source: Techspot