Zuckerberg becomes fourth-wealthiest person following shift to Meta

Tech entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg is now the world’s fourth-wealthiest billionaire — with a net worth of $201 billion — following Facebook’s rebrand to Meta in October 2021, and expansion into metaverse hardware and artificial intelligence.

Meta is currently trading at approximately $567 per share at the time of this writing — a more than six-fold increase since the stock’s November 2022 lows of roughly $88 per share.

In the year following the rebrand, Meta’s stock fell sharply from trading in the $300 range to the November 2022 lows — reflecting investor sentiment toward the company’s pivot to augmented reality experiences and the development of AI at the time.

Since that time, half the world’s 10 most valuable companies have started developing metaverse hardware including Apple, Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

According to Bloomberg, the tech billionaire’s net worth as of September 2024 places him behind Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and French businessman Bernard Arnault.

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Meta’s metaverse business and latest developments

Zuckerberg revealed Meta’s Orion augmented reality glasses at a Meta Connect event in California on Sept. 25. The novel eyewear features small projectors that create a virtual heads-up display (HUD) overlayed over objects in the real world.

During that same event, the Meta founder unveiled the newer, cheaper Quest 3S virtual reality headset that will phase out the earlier Quest 3 128 GB headset.

Despite the meteoric rise in the price of Meta’s stock since the 2021 rebrand, the company reduced its metaverse budget by 20% in July 2024 and told its metaverse division Reality Labs to reduce department expenses by 20% by 2026.

Reality Labs has lost $60 billion since 2019 and posted losses for the second business quarter of 2024. A possible reason for this has been the division’s purported shift to artificial intelligence applications.

Retooling and narrowing focus to AI

Zuckerberg previously commented that Meta seeks to grow its AI business by narrowing the company’s focus and increasing capital investment in 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,” the billionaire explained in a July 31 earings call.

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