Mark Zuckerberg loses $ 7 billion after WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram crash

Photo of Mark Zuckerberg

“Time is money”: Falling stocks lowered the value of Zuckerberg’s fortune in hours and put him one notch below Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In just a few hours, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth was reduced by nearly $ 7 billion . The reason? The worldwide fall of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp , which even caused a position in the list of the richest people in the world to drop.

Shares of the social media ‘giant’ plummeted about 5%, adding to a 15% drop since mid-September. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, this has cost Zuckerberg the fifth position among billionaires . Now, he stands with $ 120.9 billion in sixth place, behind Bill Gates .

According to a report by the DownDetector portal, problems with the platforms have occurred in various European, Asian, Latin American and North American countries. In addition, they accumulate a wave of investigations around social networks.

On September 13, The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories in which it revealed that Facebook was ‘aware’ of the problems that its products were causing, such as Instagram’s damage to the mental health of adolescents and misinformation on topics such as COVID-19 or the riots presented in the United States Capitol in early 2021.

In an interview on the television program “60 Minutes”, the former Facebook employee who leaked that documentation to the press, Frances Haugen , explained that, during her time at the company, she was “alarmed” by the decisions that were being taken, in those that “profits were put ahead of public safety and people’s lives were put at risk.”

In the interview, Haugen said that he had left Facebook earlier this year after becoming exasperated with the company. Before leaving, he copied a series of memos and internal documents.

Also one of the reports of The The Wall Street Journal showed that Facebook’s agorhythm favored posts that provoked division and anger among users and, when employees noticed and tried to fix it, they were met with the reluctance of Mark Zuckerberg , who feared that the level of interaction with the Facebook would drop. social network.