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Mark Zuckerberg has already lost more than half of his wealth this year.

He still has three months left in 2022 to make up for the $71 billion that disappeared from his net worth since the beginning of the year.

Let that sink in with satisfaction: Mark has lost $71 billion in 2022 alone.

Zuckerberg now ranks 20th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and 22nd on Forbes‘ real-time billionaire tracker, with a still mind-numbing $55,3 billion net worth on the former at the time of writing this.

Zuckerberg’s worth peaked in September last year when it reached $142 billion.

Falling 14 spots down the rung marks the lowest position that the Facebook founder has been in since 2014 – a time when Facebook’s “Boomer-blinding, democracy-destroying powers” weren’t even a thing yet.

For now, he’s sitting pretty below two members of the Koch family and a few from the Walton family on the list of the world’s wealthiest.

Much of the loss can be attributed to his pivot into the metaverse, per Bloomberg.

After his company’s shares reached as high as $382 in September 2021, Zuckerberg changed the company’s name from Facebook Inc to Meta, and it’s been largely downhill from there:

Its recent earnings reports have been dismal. It started in February, when the company revealed no growth in monthly Facebook users, triggering a historic collapse in its stock price and slashing Zuckerberg’s fortune by $31 billion, among the biggest one-day declines in wealth ever.

That was over and above that day Facebook blacked out and Zuckerberg lost some $6 billion in a matter of hours.

Image: Bloomberg

Then, Instagram’s Reels, the platform’s desperate answer to TikTok, has also given the company a financial headache, says Robb Report.

The feature has done poorly in terms of ad revenue, with many people rather turning to the original video-sharing platform instead of Insta’s copycat feature.

The metaverse shindig has clearly cost Zuck in the real world:

The stock is also being dragged down by the company’s investments in the metaverse, said Laura Martin, senior internet analyst at Needham & Co. Zuckerberg has said he expects the project will lose “significant” amounts of money in the next three to five years.

At least Mark isn’t the only guy in the tech world to have lost some dosh.

Jeff Bezos is also reportedly down a cool $46 billion, while Larry Page has seen $34 billion go bye-bye.

That does not mean that these guys don’t still have enough “f*ck you money” to spend on whatever the hell they see fit, to be clear.

[sources:robbreport&bloomberg]