By Maliha Khan Anannya
Editor: Navid Manjur Evan

Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has decreased by more than half this year, removing him from the top 10 ranks of the world’s richest as his company Meta struggles through an identity crisis with a lack of proper implementation in the planning process for the company.

All of this began shortly after Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would rebrand itself as Meta and shift its focus toward the metaverse. The company’s growth is declining because of competition from rival social media platforms such as TikTok. In July, Meta reported the first quarterly revenue decline in its history as it contended with the fallout of a global economic slowdown which might fall further due to the upcoming global recession causing the value of shares of many companies to go downhill as inflation strikes due to external shocks like the Russia-Ukraine war. The lack of proper execution of Zuckerberg’s vision for the Metaverse company promising a “utopian future” with billions of users experiencing highly digitized platform for socializing, working , learning and playing games inside the virtual and augmented universe seems like massive failure so far , to make things even more worse the sunk cost keeps on getting higher worrying the shareholders of their invested money which is billions of dollars.The shares of meta are down by around 60% since January and most of Zuckerberg’s wealth is tied to his stock holdings.

A very crucial element which is contributing to meta gigantic loss would be the VR social network “Horizon Worlds” ,a game where the players can build worlds and interact as legless avatars sort of like a “minecraft meets roblox”.The game happens to be from the company’s flagship metaverse app which contains several technical errors such as glitches and other quality issues like graphics, configuration with several other technical aspects leading to an adverse response before opening the game to the larger users to this metas VP Vishal Shah stated the “team would remain in a quality lockdown for the rest of the year to ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open Horizons to more users” in a memo to the employees.

To portray a better understanding Meta has performed worse than the tech-heavy Nasdaq index Meta has approved cost-cutting measures as the economic outlook worsens which now will result in a massive setback for the company as billions have already been spent earlier and has seen no major success and due to the cutback in funding may suffer severe consequences in the development of the platform. Moreover metas quest for success looks hopeless with the employees perplexity to the idea which was revealed in an anonymous survey where 42% of the 1000 employees did not understands metaverse strategy , even though the company contains as many as 70000 employees where a large majority works in the social media advertising hence the data may not be a good indicator to assess the current situation of the employees state but the results are a clear indication that all the employees involved are not unanimously clear regarding the vision of the company which may cause some serious coordination issues and morale decline in the foreseeable future leading to further downfall of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision and net worth to hit a giant iceberg and sink.

In recent times, Zuckerberg lost around 30 billion in a single day which also happens to be one of the largest one day decline of wealth. Mark Zuckerberg is now No. 23 on the list of the world’s richest individuals on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index which is his lowest position since 2014 and his net worth is now estimated to be around 50 billion.