Meta’s market value just dropped by more than most companies are worth

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business

Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, just had its worst trading day in its history as a public company.

The company’s shares closed down more than 26% Thursday, shaving off nearly $240 billion from its market value, after a rough earnings report released after trading hours on Wednesday.

Not only did Meta report a rare and worse-than-expected profit decline during the final three months of last year, it laid out a series of challenges to its core advertising business and revealed for the first time just how much money it’s losing on its shift to the metaverse. The company also reported a slight-but-striking decline in daily active Facebook users in the United States and Canada from the prior quarter.

The eye-popping drop in value is a reminder of just how massive the tech giant really is. Meta’s market cap has now declined by an amount that is greater than the total valuation of most public companies.

Meta’s lost market value is more than the total market cap of companies like Oracle and Cisco and nearly as much as the total value of Disney. Put bluntly, Meta just saw its market value decline by more than most public companies are worth.

It’s also a tough day for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is by far the company’s largest individual shareholder. Zuckerberg owned more than 398 million Meta shares, or 14.2% of the company’s total outstanding shares, according to an SEC filing from February 2021, the most recent filing available.

As Meta’s share price plummeted Thursday, the value of Zuckerberg’s stake in the company dropped by more than $30 billion.

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