According to a report featured in The Gateway Pundit, well over half of Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune has dissipated since the launching of Meta last October, which was brought forth as the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and a number of other products and services acquired by Zuckerberg over the years.

Despite Facebook having been financially lucrative since its launch over 18 years ago, the platform and its founder, Zuckerberg, have been embroiled in numerous scandals – especially over the past decade.

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Back in 2014, it was revealed that Facebook had been conducting a series of psychological tests two years earlier on approximately 70,000 nonconsenting Facebook users, where posts containing certain words would be removed from a user’s newsfeed to see how it would affect the user’s interactions with posts.

Then there was the explosive Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2018, where it was learned that Cambridge Analytica had extracted data from millions of Facebook users – again, without the users’ consent – so as to foment targeted ads leading up to the 2016 election.

Come 2019; Facebook wound up getting fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission, with the government entity imposing said fine due to Facebook “deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information.”

But, arguably, nothing has harmed Facebook’s reputation more than the blatant censorship the company has imposed over the years, with it being recently revealed by Zuckerberg himself that he coordinated with the federal government to suppress certain information leading up to the 2020 election.

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And it turns out that all these scandals have culminated in quite the heavy price tag.

In September of 2021, Zuckerberg’s reported wealth sat at $142 billion, where as of September 20th of 2022, his wealth rests at $56 billion – with $71 billion of that loss having occurred since the onset of the year. Albeit, Zuckerberg is in no way packing up and moving into the proverbial poor house anytime soon, but over half of a monetary empire crumbling in a year’s time signals the fragility of Meta.

And what isn’t helping Zuckerberg is the fact that there’s not exactly a lot of excitement swirling around his “next big thing”: the Metaverse.

Earlier this year, Jason Schreier from Bloomberg conducted an online poll consisting of 17,650 respondents on Twitter, asking them if they were at all excited about this Metaverse, which Schreier found that the excitement was lackluster.

“Out of 17,650 people who answered my survey, 64.5% said nope. They would not regularly use a Ready Player One-style metaverse. Fewer than 20% said they would. It wasn’t the most scientific poll, but it matches with what I’ve seen and heard anecdotally.”

Reality Labs, which is the virtual reality division of Meta that’s responsible for developing the Metaverse, is also losing billions on the investment to craft this VR world – showing that Meta – and, therefore, Facebook – are dying a slow death.

This piece was written by Gregory Hoyt on September 21, 2022. It originally appeared in RedVoiceMedia.com and is used by permission.

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