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Zuckerberg Loses $7 Billion in Hours as Facebook Plunges

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., speaks virtually during a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittees hearing on a tablet computer in Princeton, Illinois, U.S., on Thursday, March 25, 2021. The chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter are testifying as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle prepare to press the companies over the spread of false information that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attacks. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) --Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 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.

By Scott Carpenter
Oct 4, 2021, 8:09 PM
Word Count: 245
A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.

The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since Sept. 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.

On Sept. 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products — such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public. The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself.

In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.

“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN.

–With assistance from Jack Witzig.

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Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Colleen Dardagan says:

    “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” – William Shakespeare

  • Louis George Reynolds says:

    Shame the poor bugger!!

  • Rory Macnamara says:

    ag shame!

  • Alison Weston says:

    Vooitog!

  • Kanu Sukha says:

    “We must do better” … taught to him by his slew of fancy lawyers in his answers at ‘hearings’, is no different from our CR in his answers ! Given this obsession with ‘numbers’ by journalists…what is a miserly seven billion out of some 130 or so billion ? Pocket money or is it small change !

  • Lesley Young says:

    And nothing can go wrong….go wrong…..go wrong….. Roll on the fifth industrial revolution.

  • Wendy Dewberry says:

    Obscene is our education that cannot make us see the absolute psychopathy of these men having so much wealth while so many people die of hunger. Its a mad world, and the emptyheads who try tell me that they earned their wealth make me feel desperate for the human race. In pre school, if a kid takes all the toys for himself, the teacher swiftly moves in to restore toy equity. Get to high school and suddenly its the top dog who takes everything is revered. Its time we saw these fiends for what they are – egocentric grandiose psychopathic sickos who should be removed from our society. They rot us.

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