At the Meta Connect developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg, head of the Facebook group Meta, shows the prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses.
Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s second richest person.
Zuckerberg’s net worth reached $206.2 billion on Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, topping the $205.1 billion net worth of the former Amazon CEO and president. The Facebook co-founder now trails Tesla chief Elon Musk by roughly $50 billion, the index showed.
With his 13% stake in Meta, Zuckerberg’s net-worth has risen by $78 billion since the beginning of the year, which is more than any member of the of the 500 richest people that the Bloomberg Index tracks. Meta shares closed at a record high on Thursday at $582.77, representing a roughly 68% jump from early January when its shares were trading at $346.29.
Zuckerberg’s rise to the second spot on the index on Thursday underscores how his personal wealth has grown alongside investor enthusiasm over the social media giant’s rising profits this year.
Wall Street has continuously cheered Meta throughout 2024 as the company has consistently reported quarterly earnings that have surpassed analyst estimates. In July, Meta said that its second-quarter sales grew 22% to $39.07 billion, marking the fourth straight quarter of revenue growth topping 20%.
Meta has pointed to its hefty artificial intelligence investments as helping improve the performance of its online advertising platform as a reason for its sales growth. The company’s online advertising system suffered a major setback in 2021 when Apple introduced an iOS privacy update that weakened its ability to track users across the web. Meta in February 2022 said that the privacy changes would cost it $10 billion in revenue.
In late 2022, Zuckerberg instituted a major cost-cutting plan that extended into the next year and ultimately resulted in 21,000 Meta workers losing their jobs, or roughly a quarter of the company’s workforce.
Investors reacted favorably to Meta’s cost cutting while the company’s online advertising business began to rebound and was bolstered by the massive digital ad spending campaigns by Chinese-linked retailers Temu and Shien.
While Meta has continued spending billions of dollars on the virtual and augmented reality technologies needed to underpin the futuristic concept of the metaverse, investors have become more tolerant of the investments as long as the company’s core ad business remains healthy.
Last week, Meta debuted its Orion AR glasses, which garnered positive reviews from the few people who have tested the prototype.