Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2016 as a news piece from 2 February 2016; Zuckerberg’s age, fortune and ranking, the year-to-date market moves and the market capitalisations cited are all 2016 figures. Facebook has since been renamed Meta Platforms.
While the Nasdaq (the index that tracks the biggest technology companies) has slumped 10% so far in 2016, Facebook has beaten analysts’ expectations and is up 9.5% this year.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, became the world’s fourth-richest person on Tuesday at the age of 31, with a fortune of $50 billion, according to the Bloomberg index that ranks the world’s 400 richest people every day.
What’s more, with a market capitalisation of $327 billion, Facebook has also become the world’s fourth most valuable company, behind only Google ($523 billion), Apple ($534 billion) and Microsoft ($432 billion).
As a curiosity, five of the ten richest people in the world today made their fortunes from technology, and Zuckerberg is the only billionaire among the world’s five richest whose fortune has grown in 2016.
See also: This is the most important trait of top-tier entrepreneurs
Featured image: Facebook Clonee data centre from the air by Thomas Nugent, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
