Times are hard.
When President Trump was in office, gas in Southwest Virginia hovered around $2 per gallon. Now it’s around $3.
My wife told me that just a year or so ago she could buy a tray of 60 eggs for about $4.50. Now it’s $8.00.
Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s wallet lightened by about $31 billion today.
Times are hard all around.
The stock that used to be called Facebook but rebranded last fall as Meta (I supposed in a vain attempt to distance itself from the increasingly-negative vibe associated with Facebook) closed in New York trading yesterday afternoon at $323. While most Americans were sleeping last night, however, the stock began to take a drubbing in overseas markets and the rout continued today, closing at 4:00 pm at $235. (With major stock markets in Hong Kong, Frankfurt, London and elsewhere, such market exchanges run 24 hours a day, Monday-Friday.)
Simply put, Facebook lost a mind-numbing $200 billion of value in the last 24 hours, earning it the dubious distinction as the biggest single-day drop in history. To put it another way, Facebook today lost more value than most big corporations will ever have.
Many stock analysts have for the first time downgraded Facebook as an attractive investment. One claimed that since Facebook went public in 2012 until now, he has labeled it a “buy” stock for his clients. After today’s bloodbath, however, he reclassified it as “neutral.”
Pundits have offered up several explanations for the sudden fall. It seems in April 2021, Apple released a new software dubbed App Tracking Transparency (ATT). The new ATT gave a pop-up asking if the user agreed to allow an app on the phone to track all browsing history, so Apple could then better target you with ads, or else sell your data to mercenaries like Facebook and Twitter so they could target you with ads.
Surprise, surprise. When given the choice, “Do you want to allow a creepy app to operate behind-the-scenes in your phone and record all your browsing and shopping histories so we and other multimillion-dollar corporations can more effectively suck more money out of your wallet?” a large number of users chose to opt-out by tapping a button labeled “Ask App Not to Track.”
In a nutshell, the new ATT installed beginning in April has slowly been strangling the Facebook gravy train, and the chickens came home to roost in a big way during the 4th quarter of last year, whose results were recently made public, hence the stock rout.
However, the ATT, though a huge factor, is not the only one.
Some pundits also noted that, for the first time, Facebook traffic is no longer growing, but has flat-lined.
Imagine that.
Could it be whistleblowers like the movie Social Dilemma that quoted many Big Tech founders who realize they have created a monster and now regret it? Or former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who last fall went to Congress and cited internal corporate memos showing company top brass knew the emotional damage their platform does to teenagers’ mental health, especially girls, yet did nothing to solve it?
Or how about all the “fact checks” during the pandemic, election, and post-election mess? Remember the “fact checks”? When some folks saw those, the message they got was: “We at Facebook think you’re such a mindless dimwit, you have absolutely no base knowledge nor the ability to think for yourself, do your own research, or weigh evidence so you can make your own judgments. Therefore, not only must Facebook do your thinking for you, it must also shield you from any ‘misinformation’ that might fret your pretty little head. Hence, our ‘fact checks’ are here to save you from yourself.”
How many people are getting off Facebook because of the addictive behaviors, depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and envy that metastasize there like a toxic brew?
Since Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook and has large quantities of the stock, the fall hit him particularly hard. As of Wednesday night, his personal wealth was around $120.6 billion. However, with the collapse of the stock, his net assets this evening are around $90 billion. Still a tidy sum! Yet, the drop has pushed the 37-year-old out of the 10 wealthiest people in the world for the first time since July 2015.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.
–Scott Dreyer
Sources/Learn More:
Facebook Faces Tanking Shares
Meta Is Poised To Suffer The Largest One-Day Wipeout In Corporate History
