In a significant shift in the global wealth rankings, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has overtaken Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the world’s second-richest person. This milestone comes amidst a period of resurgence for Meta, following a turbulent year marked by declining stock prices and user growth concerns. Zuckerberg’s net worth climbed to $206.2 billion on Thursday, surpassing Bezos’s current estimate of $205.1 billion. The Facebook CEO trails Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk by roughly $50 billion.
Zuckerberg’s fortune has surged this year as shares of Meta Platforms Inc. have risen more than 70 percent, the highest gain among the 500 wealthiest people tracked by Bloomberg. The Menlo Park, California-based company has benefited from solid advertising growth and its push into artificial intelligence and virtual reality. It’s investing heavily in data centers and computing infrastructure to help it lead the AI industry while advancing other projects, such as its Orion augmented reality glasses introduced last month.
Earlier this year, the company announced a plan to boost the number of employees working on machine learning and artificial intelligence to 1,000 engineers. The company also plans to open a new research center dedicated solely to these efforts in Palo Alto, Calif. The increased focus on artificial intelligence has helped to bolster investor confidence. The stock is up 23% since reporting better-than-expected sales in the second quarter and touting its push into the type of large language models that power AI chatbots. The company hopes to use the technology in social media apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
The earnings report helped to ease concerns about the overall health of Facebook’s ad business. Its ad sales rose 7% during the period, with impressions and price per ad up 10%. The results helped the company narrowly beat expectations and put it in an excellent position to grow its user base and ad revenue further this year.
However, some analysts have continued questioning the company’s future as it invests heavily in virtual and augmented reality technology. Reuters reported in July that the company was testing a virtual assistant that speaks with Abraham Lincoln’s accent and another that offers travel advice in the voice of a surfer. The company’s investors may need time to adjust to these new features and see the results of the effort.
For now, the stock is up despite the concerns about Facebook’s long-term direction. The company is still generating massive amounts of revenue from its ads, which helps offset its high development costs in VR and AR. But there’s a lot of work to do before those projects pay off. The key to success, for now, is ensuring that the company can grow its core advertising business while continuing to progress in other initiatives. That could be a tall order for any company, let alone one as big and successful as Facebook.
