With a $201 billion net worth, Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Meta (formerly Facebook), jumped up to the fourth position on the global wealth list. His meteoric ascension coincides with Meta’s October 2021 strategic pivot toward metaverse hardware and artificial intelligence.
With a price per share of about $567, Meta’s stock is storming back and has increased by a staggering six times since November 2022, when it was selling for about $88. Investors were initially dubious of the company’s ambitious venture into building augmented reality and artificial intelligence, but it has since experienced this remarkable reversal in fortune.
As a result of his financial ascent, Zuckerberg is now ranked among Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault in Bloomberg’s most recent wealth rankings. Currently, half of the ten most valuable firms in the world—including corporate behemoths Apple, Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft—are creating hardware for the metaverse on their own.
Zuckerberg introduced two of the company’s most current innovations at the most recent Meta Connect event in California: the more reasonably priced Quest 3S VR headset and the Orion augmented reality glasses. These Orion glasses represent a new step in Meta’s dedication to immersive technology, since they feature sophisticated projectors capable of projecting a virtual heads-up display onto the physical world.
In spite of its soaring stock price, the business called for a 20% decrease in departmental spending by 2026 and placed a 20% budget cut on Reality Labs, its metaverse division. In actuality, Reality Labs was one of the most costly Meta projects; it has lost around $60 billion since 2019 and is still losing money as of the second quarter of 2024.
Zuckerberg has stated unequivocally that Meta plans to grow its artificial intelligence business by focusing the company’s efforts and increasing funding for AI research. During the most recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg stated, “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.”