$230 billion? Facebook’s stock plunge brings big losses for Mark Zuckerberg, Meta – and maybe you

Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, just did a face plant on Wall Street.

Shares of the social media giant were down more than 26% Thursday, the first day of trading after Meta reported a decline in profit and users during the last three months of 2021 – and most tellingly, forecast revenue declines in the current quarter.

Meta’s market value fell more than $230 billion to a market capitalization of about $661 billion. The company’s market cap had been $898.5 billion early Thursday.

The loss is the largest one-day decline in U.S. history, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Last summer, when the company was still known as Facebook, the company became only the fifth U.S. company to achieve a market value surpassing $1 trillion – the others being Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet.

Meta Platforms’ shares closed Thursday at $237.76, down about 26%. The stock price was up more than 1% in aftermarket trading to $240.60.

Shares of Meta, which will change its trading symbol on Nasdaq from “FB” to “META” in the first half of this year, are down nearly 30% so far this year.

Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally lost nearly $32 billion Zuckerberg is the largest individual Meta shareholder, with more than 374.8 million shares, or about 12.5% of total shares outstanding, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Zuckerberg’s shares had been valued at $121 billion before the market opened Thursday. When the markets closed, his holdings were worth $89.1 billion.

Zuckerberg, who has been No. 7 on Bloomberg’s Billionaires, had already seen a decline of $4.9 billion in 2022.