Zuckerberg's Meta Gamble Pays Off; Now Fourth-Richest Person Globally
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder behind Meta (previously Facebook), leaped into the ranks of the world's fourth-richest person with a net worth of $201 billion. His spectacular rise comes after the strategic shift of Meta into metaverse hardware and artificial intelligence from October 2021.
Meta's stock is making a roaring comeback, trading at around $567 per share, a massive six-fold hike from its November 2022 price of about $88. It has made this dramatic turn in fortune after investors had been initially skeptical of the ambitious foray into developing augmented reality and AI that the company embarked on.
The financial rise by Zuckerberg now places him in the company of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault, according to Bloomberg's latest wealth ranking. Half of the world's top 10 most valuable companies, including tech giants Apple, Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft, are now developing their own metaverse hardware.
During a recent Meta Connect event in California, Zuckerberg unveiled two of the company's latest creations: Orion augmented reality glasses and the more affordable Quest 3S VR headset. These Orion glasses boast advanced projectors that can beam a virtual heads-up display onto the real world, a new direction that Meta is taking in its commitment to immersive technology.
Despite high-flying stocks, the company imposed a 20% budget cut on its metaverse division, Reality Labs, and asked for a 20% reduction in departmental expenses by 2026. In fact, Reality Labs was among the most expensive Meta projects, having lost some $60 billion since 2019 and continuing to remain in loss during the second quarter of 2024.
Zuckerberg has made clear that Meta intends to scale its AI business by narrowing the focus of the company and putting more capital investment into AI research. "We've released the first frontier-level open-source AI model, and we continue to see good traction with our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses," Zuckerberg said on the recent earnings call.