Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Fell By $9 Billion, Facebook To Blame

The Forbes list of world’s top 10 billionaires is out. It shows a steep decline in the wealth of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who is at the eighth position in the list.

The Facebook boss’s fortune was hit hard by the troubles that rocked the social media giant in 2018, which included scandals, data breaches, and stock market crashes.

The chaos took a toll of Zuckerberg's wealth as the company's fortunes slipped.

According to the new data, Facebook CEO's net worth crashed by $9 billion and got reduced to $62.3 billion, down from $71 billion last year.

In 2018, Facebook faced allegations of data breaches and government slapped many investigations. The social media brand’s stock lost one-fifth of its value.

Zuckerberg, who owns nearly 17 percent of the Facebook stock became an easy victim of performance vagaries borne by the social media company.

Facebook woes

In April 2018, Zuckerberg was summoned to testify before the congressional panel on data breaches. He faced intense questioning on Cambridge Analytica breach that saw valued private data of millions of people harvested without consent and diverted for political uses.

Adding to the worries were reports users leaving the social media giant and average users spending 5 percent less time on the network.

The US and Canada markets also reported a decline in daily users and Facebook is believed to have lost 1 million users in 2018.

Despite the slide in wealth, Zuckerberg can take comfort that he is still in the top 10 leagues of the richest people in the world. At the eighth rank, he is still significant.

Top 3 billionaires

The Forbe’s statement said, among the regions, the U.S had a record 607 billionaires including 14 of the world’s 20 richest.

In the Forbe’s top 10, three names are unchanged compared to last year.

At number one is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The wealth of Bezos soared by $19 billion from 2018 to $131 billion in 2019.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates retained the second place. The net worth of Gates soared to $96.5 billion this year from $90 billion in 2018.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett also maintained his third place with a slide in net worth by $1.5 billion making it to $82.5 billion.

There are only two women in the top 20 list. One is the granddaughter of LOreal's founder, Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers at 15th place with $49.3 billion and Alice Walton of the Walmart family at 17th with a net worth of $44.4 billion.

Youngest self-made billionaire

Meanwhile, Forbes named Kylie Jenner as the youngest self-made billionaire in the world's richest people list.

The 21-year-old cosmetics brand owner reached the title at a much younger age than Zuckerberg who earned the title when he was a 23 year old.