Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by more than $6 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.
A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.
Perhaps the biggest benefactor of Facebook’s downtime was Twitter, where staff posted a tweet welcoming all the newcomers.
hello literally everyone
— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021
The outage comes shortly after a whistleblower accused Facebook of not doing enough to limit extremism on the site. That whistleblower is preparing to tell Congress that Facebook is “accountable to no one,” reports NBC’s Olivia Solon. She writes:
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen will say that the social networking giant needs Congress to enforce more transparency from the company when she testifies Tuesday at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing.
“I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more,” she will say, according to prepared remarks.
Haugen, 37, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, said that effective regulation of Facebook would need to start with transparency, including allowing “full access to data for research not directed by Facebook.”
Allowing external researchers to get a look “under the hood” of Facebook would allow for regulators to build “sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems and more,” she said.
Action Line: Your investments need accountability. The share structure of Facebook prevents Mark Zuckerberg from being fired. That’s not accountability, that’s invincibility for Zuck. With Facebook, you invest, and he wins. If your portfolio is filled with “Facebook” type stocks, maybe it’s time to consider a different approach. If you need help, I would love to talk with you.
