Zuckerberg Loses $6 Billion In Hours As Facebook Plunges (bloomberg.com) 98
Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth has fallen by more than $6 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world's richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook's flagship products offline. Bloomberg reports: A selloff sent the social-media giant's stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September. The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg's worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He's down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.
Send Zuckerberg some money? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll send him 69 and you can send him $4.20, because funny sex number and funny drug number.
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Zuckerberg can just apply for money from the infrastructure bill.
As today's incident demonstrates, for a lot of folks Facebook and its pals are their only communications infrastructure.
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It's not even real money until he sells it. And as he sells it the price will likely drop. You can't sell that much at once, and as you do sell it over time the price will change. The most he could do all at once is a swap in assets with some other billionaire.
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Did he notice? (Score:3)
Re: Did he notice? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Except they can borrow against it pretty easily, which also has tax advantages.
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Only serves to show that the whole system is completely arbitrary and mostly smokes and mirrors.
The real tragedy.... (Score:2, Informative)
That it wasn't a multiple day failure and more money out of his pocket.
Re: The real tragedy.... (Score:2)
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You can sort your assets by their liquidity, with money sitting at the top.
End of the day, if you object to the use of net worth as an indicator of how much "money" someone has, it's because you don't have a net worth that's worth measuring. All I can say is, keep at it. It took me until about 35 until I started measuring my net worth instead of my "money"
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I still say, if he's worth that much, let's crack him open and distribute it around.
Short term (Score:3)
Next month he'll make it all back as the stock rebounds.
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I doubt that very much.
The whistleblower has exposed what a lot of us thought was the reality. Facebook will soon have to Face the Music and now that it's kinda out that Facebook and fake news is enough to change voters decisions, I can pretty much promise you they'll either have to conform to the powers that be (you know, there's corruption there as well), or they will be outlawed at some point.
Re:Short term (Score:4, Informative)
The whistleblower has exposed what a lot of us thought was the reality. Facebook will soon have to Face the Music and now that it's kinda out that Facebook and fake news is enough to change voters decisions, I can pretty much promise you they'll either have to conform to the powers that be (you know, there's corruption there as well), or they will be outlawed at some point.
The powers that be are thankful for facebook's work to make them the powers that be.
Re: Short term (Score:2)
Until people stop using Facebook, nothing will change. Sure, politicians like to bitch about FB because itâ(TM)s fun and satisfying for the public, but it will amount to nothing.
1. Conservatives need it to sustain their universe of alternate facts and to keep their base enraged. (Just look at who are the most consistently engaged posters: Shapiro, Bongino, etc)
2. Liberals need it to crowdsource funds
3. Conservatives need it to crowdsource funds
4. Pols in the middle need corporate contributions to their
Re: Short term (Score:2)
I think more simply any social network with more than 1 billion users should not be covered by platform protections. They should be liable for all content posted to their platform. Users can sue if they are misinformed by their friends and Facebook doesn't catch it. They'll quickly discover many high quality algorithms to manage content or they'll ban problematic people.
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We definitely run in different circles if that's your experience.
All of the political posts I see are extremely left leaning and anything critical of Biden gets redirected to Trump.
I lean strongly to the right and I don't post anything right leaning.
Re: Short term (Score:2)
That may be a perfect example of the algorithm showing us content it has determined we are most likely to interact with. Just because you do not post anything right leaning, it does know what you read, who you are friends with, and sites you visit outside Facebook.
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Until then I do expect that facebook will recover like it did every other time. After all the majority people don't seem to give a shit about what facebook does as long as they're provided with those convenient services.
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It isn't the first time Facebook has dealt with a scandle and it every previous case it bounced back, because there are so many addicts.
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C'mon, how long have you been on this planet?
About 90% of the people (who could, let's ignore for a moment the couple millions that have no access to news) don't even know what happened. Of the rest, 90% are too apathetic to care. And of that insignificant rest, 90% are by now jaded and worn out from trying to do shit that the other 99% don't care that they don't care anymore either.
The rest may cause some noise, but as soon as government realizes that it's less than 1% of the population who even gives a sh
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You are absolutely right. And to add to that, Fox News got a court decision to confirm that it is alright for them to ACTIVELY LIE to their viewers. I don't think Facebook is gonna catch much shit for merely passively allowing users to lie on their platform (especially since they are no longer passive, and are actively making attempts to slap labels and fact checks on much of the misinformation).
And some of this shit, about facebook causing teen girls to feel bad and depressed about themselves? Yeah, it's a
Interesting timing (Score:2)
The timing of the outage is interesting.
Normally when a story breaks there's instant response, pushback, and perhaps an army of trolls mobilized to soften the online versions (and perhaps censorship, many of which are "by mistake" of the company and "we'll do better next time".)
In this case, much of the pushback has been avoided due to the outage. Lots and lots of people got to think about the whistleblower account, and lots of people were able to look up and watch the whistleblower account, without interfe
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Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram went offline to keep people from talking about this little scandal all over their network, or they were just hacked...
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Or just as likely facebook did it on purpose.
("psst hey you IP Engineering guy, there is a 500,000 account in CI and the number is yours if you push a bad BGP filter tomorrow and we promise you won't lose your job")
While its a strategy that can easily backfire because as you say it can leave your critics more space to control the narrative on the original topic, sometimes just changing the conversation is enormously beneficial in terms of real politik.
A major platform wide outage isn't exactly a positive (
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"Sell! Sell! Sell!"
"Oh wait... Facebook has *that* much power!?!"
"Buy! Buy! Buy!"
And ... nothing of value was lost? (Score:2, Insightful)
Do I really need to be the first to make this joke?
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Of course, and to complete the effect we'll do a bitcoin comparison.
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The clever guys at Slashdot always knew what a scam Bitcoin was. Good job we listened to them!
"Bitcoin reaches dollar parity"
https://slashdot.org/story/11/... [slashdot.org]
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nice guy (Score:2)
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
groundhog day (Score:2)
Please be like that Groudhog Day movie and let today happen over and over.
No he didn't (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe Zuckerberg is a little disappointed about losing a few spots on the rich guy's rankings, and I am sure he is pissed off about the current outage and that whisteblower making waves, but I bet he is not losing any sleep over "losing" that $6 billion.
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The problem is, when you have that much on-paper wealth, you can live like it's real even if you never realize the gains.
Re: No he didn't (Score:2)
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Facebook shares dropped from $343 to $326 in a day. That's nothing. How could a 4.9% drop in Facebook's shares cause Zuckerberg any significant financial problems? Apparently his net worth has fallen from $127B to $120B.
His wealth is just as real as T-bonds or the US deficit. If you stop believing that Zuckerberg is worth $120B, you might as well be questioning whether the USD has any actual value.
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No you can't. For example, if Zuck had borrowed against his stock he'd owe a crapload right now due to the stock dip
No, that's not how it works.
You use your assets as collateral, hence "borrowing against".
For some people, that may be a house (mortgage) but if you own enough securities that including the estimated variability, it's perceived that you'd still have plenty to liquidate to pay back the loan, then you use your securities instead.
and if he wasn't able to pay it then he'd lose a bunch of stock to his creditors.
You truly have no fucking idea what you're talking about, here.
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I seem to recall an article here on slashdot explaining that's exactly what Larry Ellison of Oracle does: he borrowed 20 bln against his stock in oracle, as collateral, and gets to take the write-off on the loan. When he dies, the stock goes to the bank, and he himself has said that he won't give a shit.
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Yes, he borrows the money using his assets as collateral (stock in this case).
He doesn't get a write-off on the loan (but if he doesn't pay it back, he does have to pay taxes on it)
He will also pay taxes on profit of the assets he liquidates.
The advantage to him borrowing vs. liquidating it all at once is that slow sell-offs are preferred from the standpoint of the Corporation, and his own personal ownership.
So he can go and spend 300 million on something, worth around 1/5th of his Oracle s
Re: No he didn't (Score:2)
He literally can. It is a common tax avoidance scheme. Stock billionaires borrow against their shares at extremely low interest, write it off, and avoid paying any income tax on it.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
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It's a simple trick. When you borrow money, you don't pay taxes on that money. Nobody does.
You do pay taxes if you don't pay it back, though. You can't write that off.
What they're doing is deferring the taxes on something.
Let's say you want to pay $300m for something.
They need to liquidate $300m in assets (which are going to be taxed at 20%, because they're all long-term capital gains)
That sucks. Means you need to liquidate a lot more assets just to get that $300m.
Instead, you
Re: No he didn't (Score:4, Informative)
This is correct in the top line sense but in terms of individual wealth building its 'more complicated'
Zuck could for example take a personal loan against facebook shares (pays no taxes), avoids what would be huge capital gains exposure on his founders stock. He will pay interest on the loan of course and also on the entire principle amount but at a much lower rate than even long term capital gains taxes in our current environment. He then invests the money in something else to 'diversify' when he does this this cost basis there will be the current price of the securities, not zero like his FB holdings. He can trade those on greater than 1 year cycles to make them long term gains.
So lets say FB shares are $330 today and Zucks basis on them is for all intents $0. If he sold 10,000 shares he'd get 3,300,000 in proceeds and owe something like 660,000 in LTCG taxes.
However say he borrows 3,300,000 for a 1 year term with an APR of 3% his interest payments would be 99,000. He buys some EFT which gains 5% over the same year, and than liquidates he'll have 3,465,00 in cash but only owe LTCG taxes on the 165,000 so something like 33,000. He will retire the loan with the original capital. So taxes and interest are going to be something like 132,000 together - less than 660,000 by a lot and he got additional safety from diversity to boot. Question to ask is would FB have over performed the market over that year - could his net-worth have increased by more than 33,000 just sitting in FB -maybe.
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See, that's the real reason most people are so poor in America - they don't do these things! Instead of living paycheck to paycheck, people should be thinking about taking out loans against their potential income at really reasonable interest rates, and then investing that money in something that earns 1,000 times more than the average savings account! And since America's tax code is so complicated, perhaps they can hire a CPA apprentice on fiverr.com to work out their tax situation, and hire a financial
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Cash is just another asset. It's more liquid than securities- for sure, but if you haven't diversified your assets, it's because you don't have any to speak of.
When you need cash, you liquidate some of your assets. He can now liquidate less assets into cash than he could the other day. That is a loss of wealth, wealth that has a dollar amount of value associated with it. Ergo, he lost money.
This isn't complicated.
Playing the world's smallest violin... (Score:2)
The Poor house (Score:2)
Oh wait, he didn't lose $6B in cash. Seriously, these net worth comparisons of billionaires are just meaningless. If I lost $6,000 from my savings that would be more meaningful than Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos losing $6 Billion in net worth.
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If I lost $6,000 from my savings that would be more meaningful than Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos losing $6 Billion in net worth.
That's because you're poor, not because the $6 Billion in net worth is meaningless.
I.e., your real beef isn't with the use of assets as a measurement of wealth (which regardless of what you think, they are) but rather the fact that it's a tiny fraction of his total wealth.
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Don't know about the original poster, but I kind of think that there's something very wrong with our society when a CEO of a company earns $2 million dollars per employee, even over 17 years. People having hundreds of millions of dollars is pushing it from my perspective. Hundreds of billions of dollars is obscene. Zuckerberg's wealth is about 40x the GDP of the entire country of Andorra. No one should have that kind of wealth.
And because that wealth is amassed under the control of so few people, we, t
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LOL FB's stock didn't drop nearly enough (Score:3)
5% is nothing in the stock market
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5% is nothing in the stock market
Haha, yeah, before the global pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands, put millions out of work, and continues to shutdown huge parts of the economy, the stock was trading at ~$200. Now it is 'down' to $320.
The stock market is a joke. It basically just depends on how much money J. Powell and his buddies think they can hand out to themselves before the public gets upset.
-$20billion (Score:2)
If I had $100billion, making more money wouldn't be the first thing on my goal list. Not even close. I wouldn't even care about the lost $20billion.
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If I had $100billion, making more money wouldn't be the first thing on my goal list. Not even close.
Agreed.
I wouldn't even care about the lost $20billion.
Strongly disagreed.
Losing 15% of your wealth is a big deal. Not because the remaining $100 billion isn't enough for anything you can imagine, but simply because if something can wipe out 15%, it can wipe out 30%. If it can wipe out 30%, it can wipe out 60%.
15% is more than enough to set off some major alarms for better diversification. Of course that's complicated for The Zuck since most of his wealth is ownership of Facebook, a company I'm sure he's not eager to divest away from.
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I don't start worrying until I can't afford the private jet anymore. And I don't mean a small jet, I mean an A300 with a hot tub.
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If I had $100billion, making more money wouldn't be the first thing on my goal list. Not even close. I wouldn't even care about the lost $20billion.
This would be a normal reaction, 100 billion is at least 100 times more money than a single person would need in a lifetime of luxury. You could do nothing, make 6% or 60 million a year forever on that 1% of 100 billion.
Yet these billionaire chumps work 70+ hour weeks non stop to keep getting more and more like some kind of rat at a cocaine feeder bar.
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If I had $100billion, making more money wouldn't be the first thing on my goal list. Not even close. I wouldn't even care about the lost $20billion
You only think it is relative. If you had $100B, and gave me the $20B you don't think you'd care about, you'd make me roughly the 90th richest person in the US. With $20B, I could build a nuclear power plant for $10B and build to order a 1960's era nuclear powered aircraft carrier with a full compliment of the finest stealth fighters money can buy, pilots and all, and run and staff the whole thing for about 30 years. Not exaggerating at all. But that would be silly because for less than $500M I could buy m
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> If I had $100billion, making more money wouldn't be the first thing on my goal list. Not even close. I wouldn't even care about the lost $20billion.
That's why you don't have $100billion.
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I would say that it's definitely not the only reason.
Zero Zuck (Score:2)
Poor guy (Score:2, Funny)
Is there an address where I can send him food and supplies until he gets back on his feet?
15 second postmortem: (Score:2)
Here’s my 15 second postmortem of the Facebook outage.
Facebook borked a GBP update with a new, internal automated GBP service. As a result every mobile device made in the last 10 years could no longer access Facebook servers and started repeatedly asking for Facebook on local DNSs for a new IP. They started browning out DNS servers on cellular networks and other places bringing down other services.
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They must have misconfigured their British Pounds for Euros.
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It's a common mistake.
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Yeah, I often screw up the DSN while smoking the Great Big Pipe...
Buying the dip (Score:2)
Poor Zuckie.
Don't worry, now that they are back online, he'll get his $6B back as institutional investors and hedge funds see the low intra-day price and buy. People will be fired for the mistake and he'll be as rich as ever - if not more so - and nothing of substance will change.
Karma (Score:1)
The article didn't mention an important bit (Score:2)
Why the hell should I give a fuck?
Poor Sysadmin (Score:2)
I don't want to be the poor BGP-handler with a clumsy hand who is going be dragged to the penthouse office suites to explain to Sugarmountain why he just lost more than the GDP of a small country.
Huh.... (Score:2)
I'm sorry, am I supposed to feel sorry for this dirtbag?
Facebook down, peace breaks out (Score:2)
All over the world, peaceful demonstrations are breaking out as Facebook goes dark. In the U.S., the republican party is putting down their guns and offering free backrubs to their democratic counterparts. Mitch McConnel and Jim Jordan are now backing the 3.5 trillion infrastructure bill. Marjorie Taylor Green is offering to clean AOC's house for a year. The Orange One is giving away billions to charity, and best of all, Jeff Bezos has asked Elon Musk to lob his satellites into orbit.
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Peace?? Eww! Can't have that!
-- Murica
"Loses" imaginary money (Score:3)
I'll say it again: The entire point of the plunge is, that the actual worth was not the same as the illusionary worth of those "valuations"! So it doesn't mean he lost anything! It means he never had it in the first place and people were just deluded about what he had!
I never get why they don't cash out (Score:2)
Zuck has the money to allow himself and many of his closest friends (if he has any) to live in a perpetual utopia.
Why continue to waste energy leading Facebook?
Ummm - The entire NASDAQ took a shit on the 4th. (Score:1)
That's why FB was down, with just about every other high profile tech company.
Ohh look, 2% is back already.
Aw that poor billionaire! (Score:1)
Couldn't happen to a shittier guy (Score:1)
Capitalism to the rescue! (Score:2)
Since Mark Zuckerberg lives in a capitalistic society that worships rich people, it will be no problem for the rest of the country to bail him out.
Small price to pay to" Purge" incriminating data ? (Score:1)