Mark Zuckerberg Lost More Money Than Any American Last Year
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SOURCE - For the first time since 2015, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t one of the 10 richest people in America.
Zuckerberg has lost more than half his fortune—a staggering $76.8 billion—since September 2021, dropping him from No. 3 on The Forbes 400 list of the U.S.’ wealthiest people to No. 11. Worth $57.7 billion on this year’s list, which used stock prices from September 2, Zuck trails Walmart heir Jim Walton, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and other tech moguls such as ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. No one in America has lost as much money over the past year as Zuckerberg.
The only people who like Facebook now are people who consider me to be young. Meta seems either weird or stupid or both. The article later says that half of Zuckerberg's fortune is tied to Meta stock which has plunged 57% in the last 13 months.
If you go to the About Meta page on their website, it says Meta is about bringing people closer every day. You can do so currently by buying a strange VR headset for $399 and get a something called a beat saber included. This is supposedly the future. Meta Reality Labs, the company's Metaverse division lost $10 billion dollars in 2021 alone.
I would never have expected social media to dominate our lives if you presented the concept of Facebook to me 25 years ago. It just seems like such a giant leap for an average person to go from skimming Facebook on the couch while watching something on TV to putting on a headset and dancing in space or doing other VR shit while "connecting" with people. Could that appeal to some people? Sure. Roughly 200 million Americans use Facebook each month. That's more than half of the country. I can't imagine half of everyone I've ever met fighting dragons while riding unicorns. I'd like to imagine it but I can't.
I think The Social Network is the most important movie of this century. The reason I feel that way is because it tackles a subject matter and a mindset that has dominated and is unique to the past 20 years. It's also brilliantly directed with a fantastic cast. It's a legitimately great movie. But it also captures something that has had an iron grip on us as a culture for a generation now. Meta doesn't capture that same relevancy. How much is Zuckerberg willing to lose to keep trying to make it so?