Mark Zuckerberg is richer by $10 billion

It seems Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now even richer as the net worth of the executive has increased by a massive margin. His net worth has reportedly increased by $10.2 billion, which pulls him up to the 12th position in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This is the result of an increase in Meta’s shares by 14 percent.

Meta witnessed good growth in terms of profit in the first quarter of 2023 after cutting 21,000 jobs and other expenses. The tech giant earned a net profit of $5.7 billion in the quarter ending March, which is 22.7 percent higher than what the company gained in the four quarters of 2022.

“We had a good quarter, and our community continues to grow,” Zuckerberg said. “Our AI work is driving good results across our apps and business,” he added. It is being said that the billionaire’s wealth is mostly driven by his 12.8 percent stake in Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook.

Zuckerberg now has a fortune of $87.3 billion. A report from Bloomberg reveals that this hike has helped him reach the highest net worth ever in over a year, making up for the loss that he incurred back in 2022 when his net worth dropped to $71 billion. Last year, Zuckerberg lost about $29 billion of his net worth because Meta’s stock fell by 26 percent, which reduced $200 billion from the social media company’s market capitalisation.

While the tech giant has started witnessing hike in profits, the process of cutting down expenses is still going on. Meta has so far conducted two rounds of layoffs and it was recently discovered that the company has started sacking people in technical roles, including user experience, software engineering, graphics programming, and more. A Meta spokesperson also confirmed the new round of layoffs to CNBC.

One of the workers who has been laid off told the cited source that layoffs have been done in product-facing teams. In addition to this, Meta also plans to hand over pink slips to people who are in business-facing roles such as finance, legal, and HR. This is said to take place in May this year. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously apologized for the layoff decision in an email sent to impacted employees.

Previously, Zuckerberg stated that there are several reasons behind announcing layoffs. One is the economic downturn and the slow growth that Meta has been witnessing. Due to this, the company has been witnessing low revenue growth. In an email, the tech giant also stated that it over-hired in the past few years because of business needs.