Mark Zuckerberg loses $6 bn amid whistleblower row, Facebook outage

Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has gone down more than $6 billion in hours, knocking him down to 5th rank on the list of world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and the social media platform faced outages taking Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.

Monday’s stock slide brought 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.

On Sept. 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products — such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public.

The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself. Facebook in its response has stressed about the issues its products are facing including both political and technological factors.

A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN, “I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States.”

Edited by Tarab Abbas Zaidi

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