The price of shares in Meta — the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Meta Quest (fka Oculus) — has dropped more than 25 percent from the previous day’s close, the morning after it revealed its first-ever sequential decline in Facebook’s daily active users. After closing at $323 Wednesday, they dropped as low as $238.90 before recovering slightly.
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Bloomberg reports that the $200 billion plunge may rank as the biggest single-day drop in market value ever, as Meta struggles with waning relevance among young people and CEO Mark Zuckerberg refocuses its aim toward “metaverse” plans.
Meta wasn’t the only company having a rough Thursday; the entire Nasdaq exchange was off by nearly 2 percent by midday, and rivals Snap and Twitter were also trading lower. Snap, which lists on the New York Stock Exchange, was down by more than 20 percent shortly before 11 AM ET, and Twitter, also on the NYSE, was off by about 6 percent.
Of course, Meta is still worth some $671 billion and reported over $40 billion in profit for 2021, despite the “headwinds” cited frequently on a call with investors to discuss the results. That’s a slightly better position than it was after its 2012 “clusterfuck” of an IPO when it took an entire year before the company’s stock rebounded to match the original offering price.