Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has gone from very eye-watering to extremely eye-watering. Like, the tears are just constantly streaming at this point, to be honest.
The staggering figures come as Meta has had a mega $20 billion (£15.06 billion) week.
Jesse Eisenberg’s come a long way since he was doing business with Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake.
Ok, but in all seriousness, Zuckerberg has gone from creating a site for his fellow students at Harvard University to becoming one of the richest men in the world.
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And on Wednesday (30 July) Meta made its earnings announcement, as the tech firm said revenue for the three months to the end of June rose 22 percent from the same period last year to a whopping $47.5 billion (£35.86 billion).
On top of that, profits jumped by 36 percent to $18.3 billion (£13.78 billion) but expenses are also rising as Meta puts money into fuelling Zuckerberg’s AI ambitions.
The tech giant’s earnings announcement then led to a jump by more than 10 percent in extended trading in New York as shares hit an all-time high of $780 (£590).
So, with all that, Bloomberg Billionaires Index put the CEO as having a total net worth of $263 billion (£198.03 billion) on Thursday – an increase of $26.8 billion (£20.2 billion) since the day before.
Zuckerberg currently sits behind Tesla boss Elon Musk and Oracle Corporation’s co-founder Larry Ellison as the richest people in the world.
Wednesday’s big money call had quite the focus on Meta’s AI plans and ambitions, with the boss laying out his vision hours beforehand.
In an Instagram video, he described plans for developing what he’s naming ‘AI Superintelligence’ that surpasses ‘human intelligence to solve complex problems’.
“Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves,” Zuckerberg wrote in a memo.
“The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”
He didn’t particularly give details of what would qualify as this ‘superintelligence’ versus regular artificial intelligence, but did add that it would pose ‘novel safety concerns’.
Zuckerberg wrote: “We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.”
He said Meta differs from other AI firms because its aim is to bring ‘personal superintelligence to everyone’ rather than it being used to automate ‘all valuable work’ and for productivity.
“The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society,” the rich, rich, rich man wrote.
Topics: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Business
Jess Battison