In the fourth quarter of last year, Facebook and especially Instagram did so well that the incoming advertising revenue generated an unprecedented profit, which was also helped by the fact that the company implemented a huge cost reduction last year:
this also took the exchange rate to an all-time high.
The misstep before last year
All this happened after Mark Zuckerberg “lost” a lot of money in 2022 with the development of the metaverse, which did not yield any results. This left a bad impression on the shareholders, as the share price fell by a quarter at the time, but with last year’s excellent result, they thought that this misstep had been eliminated.
The past haunts me again
Now, however, another cold shower has hit them: despite the brutally high sales and profit in the first quarter of this year, Zuckerberg did not talk about anything else at the press conference following the announcement of the results, other than that he is pushing the metaverse again, now supplemented with artificial intelligence, and that they will spend huge amounts of money on it , weakening the second quarter result.
Could be a cash cow
In addition, the Facebook boss even scolded his audience by saying that these investments will only slowly turn to fruition, just as many things were slow to become profitable in the past. Yes, but in the case of Facebook and Instagram, which are used by almost half of humanity, it was obvious that sooner or later they would be flooded by advertisers, but the metaverse is still an uncertain idea, and it is not even clear what the company will do with artificial intelligence.
If Zuckerberg didn’t force these developments, the company would be able to live off the amazing advertising revenue of the most popular social media platforms like a real cash cow, even
not a small part of which was also returned to the shareholders.
Instead of overtaking in a corner, it’s a big crash
Zuckerberg’s wealth was already close to Elon Musk’s, but the rise of Tesla on Wednesday and the fall of Facebook (Meta) on Thursday completely changed the situation, so much so that Elon Musk overtook Jeff Bezos and can be the happy holder of the title of the second richest person according to Forbes real-time according to his list.
Google and Microsoft have it
On Thursday evening, both Microsoft and Google (Alphabet) reported their first quarter results, both were very good, both companies are doing well in the cloud-based business sector, in which they can already utilize artificial intelligence.
In indicative trading after the stock market closed, Google’s share price rose by more than 10 percent, so there is a good chance that it will take back third place from Nvidia among the world’s largest listed companies, and Microsoft jumped by 5 percent, even though it was already the world’s largest company.
