3 February 2022: Meta loses a record chunk of value in a day
After reporting its first ever decline in daily users and warning about Apple's privacy changes, Facebook parent Meta saw its shares fall about 26%, wiping out over $230 billion in market value, then the largest one-day loss for a US company. Investors also balked at billions being poured into the metaverse. Within two years the stock had recovered and then some. Panic is not a valuation method.
The lesson: Even giants can fall by a quarter in a day; the question is whether the business is actually broken.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Facebook / Meta at the start of 2020 → $3,333 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is 3.3 times the money, and $1,241 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Facebook / Meta teaches: Founder control cuts both ways: Zuckerberg's unchecked authority produced brilliant acquisitions and an expensive metaverse detour, and shareholders could vote on neither.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $78.00 | $8,974 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $180 | $3,889 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $210 | $3,333 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Facebook / Meta? Every starting year and the full story →
More Facebook / Meta history
- 9 April 2012: Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion
- 10 April 2018: Zuckerberg testifies and Facebook stock rises
- 18 May 2012: Facebook's bumpy IPO
- 26 July 2018: Facebook loses about $119 billion in a day
- 4 October 2021: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go dark for hours
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
Play Sixty-40