First Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. Now he’s dropping out of the upper echelons of the world’s wealthiest rankings.
While still doing fine with a total net worth of $55 billion, that’s an almost unbelievable drop from where it stood at the beginning of this year, when his net worth topped $125 billion and seemed like it was headed towards $150 billion.
Zuckerberg has long professed to be uninterested in the trappings of personal wealth and the rankings of the world’s richest people. That’s good news because as of this writing, Mark is no longer even one of the 20 richest people in the world. By our count he now sits at #22 on the list of the 100 richest people in the world (our list includes Vladimir Putin at $70b).
At the beginning of the year Mark was the fourth richest person in the world behind only Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, respectively. It is striking to see just how much wealth Zuck has lost over the course of those several months.
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How’d it happen? Zuckerberg and his Facebook/Meta empire has seen some precipitous drops in stock market price over the course of 2022, and it’s those drops that have managed to shed some $70 billion from his own net worth, the bulk of which is tied up in Facebook stock. Of course, Facebook isn’t the only company to see its stock market fortunes fall in a volatile economy, but it’s worth noting that Musk, Bezos, and Gates have all stayed in the top five richest people in the world as Zuckerberg has fallen out of the top 20.
Zuckerberg has traveled a rocky road trying to get his virtual reality “Metaverse” off the ground, at the same time seeing much of Facebook and Instagram’s popularity gobbled away by rival video platform TikTok. Whether or not he will see any kind of bounce back in the near future remains to be seen.