By Munachimso Obienyi
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meta; formerly Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has dropped out of the top ten richest men in the United States, according to Forbes.
The American business magazine revealed this via The Forbes 400 list of the U.S.’ wealthiest people, stating that Zuckerberg has lost more than half his fortune totaling a shocking $76.8 billion which started occurring in September 2021.
According to Forbes, this is the first time the internet entrepreneur experienced such a fall since 2015, as he plummeted fr om the third position to number 11.
Mark Zgutowicz, an analyst at research and investment banking firm, Benchmark, disclosed that Facebook is not making money from advertising currently which has adversely affected the company’s owner.
“Facebook makes most of its money from advertising, and now it just doesn’t have that data anymore. All those data signals went away, which basically means that advertisers are having trouble telling whether a campaign was successful or not,” Zgutowicz said.
Zuckerberg first became a billionaire in 2008, just four years after founding Facebook. At 23, he was the youngest self-made billionaire at the time, debuting at No. 321 on The Forbes 400, worth $1.5 billion.
However, by 2011, Zuckerberg’s net worth had increased nearly 12-fold to $17.5 billion.
The richest American on the Forbes list is the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk due to his 11% rise in an estimated $60.5 billion added this year.
The second and third richest men are Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, Amazon and Microsoft founders respectively.
