Meta’s Sad Slide Whistle of a Day ⇥ bnnbloomberg.ca

Thyagaraju Adinarayan and Jan-Patrick Barnert, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc.’s one-day crash now ranks as the worst in stock-market history.

The Facebook parent plunged 26 per cent Thursday on the back of woeful earnings results, and erased about US$251.3 billion in market value. That’s the biggest wipeout in market value for any U.S. company ever.

If that sounds bad because maybe you own stock in this company or something, maybe hearing it in VoiceOver will cheer you up.

It was only earlier this week that CNBC reported with a straight face that “real estate” sales in the “metaverse” reached half a billion dollars in the last year. Perhaps most embarrassing for Meta Inc. is that it was not listed as one of the “big four” platforms selling pixels on a screen as land. But surely Meta’s association with this new medium would boost investors’ morale, right?

Well, Meta is already spreading the blame around. It says App Tracking Transparency is finally going to hit the company’s revenue to the tune of $10 billion. And it also says that its investments in 3D meetings will take time to pay off. So what can it do in the meantime?

Naomi Nix and Kurt Wagner, at a different flavour of Bloomberg:

At a company-wide virtual meeting, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta’s weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. It is important to focus on growing Facebook’s short-video product, he said.

A real-life pivot to video — in 2022.