Facebook’s share price fell more than 20 percent in perhaps one of the biggest one-day drop of all time. Facebook shares opened at $174.89, down 19.6% compared to yesterday’s closing price of $217.50.
Yesterday, Facebook was worth $629.6 billion. Today, it is worth $506.2 billion. That means they lost more than $123 billion overnight.
This drop comes after the company announced its slowest-ever growth rate and a warning that its revenue growth would decelerate. In just two hours, Facebook lost more value than most startups, and even some public companies are worth.
The drop isn’t because of data misuse, election interfering, or any other scandal that Facebook has been recently facing. For the first time, there are barely more people checking Facebook every day compared to the previous quarter. Facebook is fighting against a slow user growth rate, and the user count even shrank in Europe. Although Facebook is growing slowly, it is clear that the GDPR combined with competition from other social media apps have caused Facebook’s domination to stall.
Perhaps to distract from this lack of growth, Facebook has shared a new “family of apps audience” metric for the first time. The metric shows that at least 2.5 billion people are using at least one of the company’s apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Some shareholders might be attempting to check CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s power after his “mishandling” of recent scandals. On Wednesday, Investment company Trillium Asset Management filed a proposal to separate the chair and CEO positions, which are currently both held by Zuckerberg.
“Separating the chair and CEO positions reduces this conflict, and an independent chair provides the clearest separation of power between the CEO and the rest of the board,” the proposal states.
Zuckerberg personally lost about 20% of his fortune, around $16.8 billion, after the significant drop in Facebook’s stock shares.
