Zuckerberg complains Facebook faces ‘unprecedented level of competition’ as he loses $29bn
Social media giant reported losing nearly half million daily users during the last quarter of 2021
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Your support makes all the difference.Mark Zuckerberg has complained to his employees that Facebook faces an “unprecedented level of competition” after he lost $29bn when its shares plummeted, a report says.
The social media giant’s founder urged staff to focus on video products during a company-wide virtual meeting on Thursday, held in the wake of the tech firm seeing a quarter of its value wiped out.
Mr Zuckerberg told staff that the huge drop was a result of Meta’s weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, a meeting attendee told Bloomberg.
He also told the meeting that although he had a red eye it was not from crying, it was because he had scratched an eye, said Bloomberg.
The tech entrepreneur repeated remarks to investors, telling staff that Facebook faced an “unprecedented level of competition” from the rise of video platform TikTok.
Mr Zuckerberg was asked a question about employee burnout and replied that the company was thinking of offering staff long weekends, as he encouraged them to sue their vacation days.
But he said that from his own experience he did not believe that switching to a four-day week would be a productive move.
Facebook announced during a Wednesday earnings call that the company had lost 500,000 in daily logins during the last quarter of 2021.
The report saw Facebook shares plummet more than 20 per cent, wiping more than $200bn off the company’s market cap.
The number of daily active Facebook users fell by 1 million to 1.929 billion, with the company blaming competition from rivals like TikTok and YouTube.
Zuckerberg is ranked as the world’s seventh richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, with his net worth before the share price collapse estimated at $121bn.
He said he was confident that the company’s new focus on the metaverse would prove a massive opportunity for new streams of revenue and growth, though some are skeptical about the promise of virtual worlds.
Elon Musk, who tops the list of the world’s richest people, recently expressed doubts about the metaverse, claiming that it was a fringe technology that lacked the appeal of traditional social media.
“I don’t know if I necessarily buy into this metaverse stuff, although people talk to me a lot about it,” he said in an interview with conservative satire site The Babylon Bee. “I don’t see someone strapping a friggin’ screen to their face all day.”
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