Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg lost over $15 billion yesterday after Facebook stocks plummeted 25 percent. According to Inc. , the stock’s value dropped after a “disappointing earnings report.” As of Thursday morning, the world’s largest social media platform was on pace to lose well over $115 billion in market value.
Analysts say the reason for the massive loss is the company’s second-quarter earnings report, which severely underperformed. Though revenue was up, it was not enough, especially after factoring in the cost of each share.
“The company reported a 42% increase in quarterly revenue to $13.2 billion but missed Wall Street’s expectations by $200 million,” Buzzfeed News reports. Facebook admitted that there may be a further decline in “revenue growth rates” in the “high single-digit percentages” in the latter half of 2018.
Additionally, the social media platform has seen a stagnation in growth. Though there are 2.5 billion people using a Facebook-owned platform each month, Facebook itself has seen little growth.
Facebook co-founders Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz lost $2.2 billion and $3.9 billion, respectively. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, lost $100 million, according to Bloomberg .
Wednesday’s stock plummet comes after Facebook has faced months of criticism after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which it was revealed that Facebook may have had a “role in helping to spread Russian state-sponsored misinformation before and after the 2016 election.” As the New York Times reports, Cambridge Analytica was able to access the private information of more than “50 million Facebook users” in order to utilize their tools to influence the behavior of American voters.
Though Facebook’s Terms of Service usually “prohibits this kind of data to be sold or transferred to any ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related service,” Cambridge Analytica notes that it had been the fault of Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at Cambridge University.
“He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested, though they were all told that it was being used for academic use,” reports the New York Times .
As a response to the scandal, Facebook issued a statement saying that though they urged Cambridge Analytica to delete that data it had procured, “we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted. We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims.”
Facebook’s loss on Thursday marks the largest one-day stock market loss in American history.
