Should Mark Zuckerberg Step Down As Facebook CEO?

The year 2018 seems to be greatly unfortunate for all the business tycoons causing losses to many significant ones in the beginning, including the Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos who went down his market shares by $2 billion, the founders of Alphabet (the parent company of Google) who suffered a blow worth $1.5 billion each, and then the recently discussed Elon Musk, this year seems to carry an unlucky charm for the leading magnates. But the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg seems to be somewhat more affected for the ongoing falls in his market value, culminated by a recent loss worth more than $120 billion to his company's market value! Yeah, you read that right, record-breaking loss worth approximately 120-billion-dollars in value, exceeding the Intel’s $90.7 billion and Microsoft’s $80 billion loss in 2000.

The loss came in consequence to the Wednesday’s disappointing Q2 2018 earnings call when a loss in the future revenue generation was predicted. The company ended its day on 25th July with a market capitalization of $630 billion, but at the trade end on Thursday, the capital reduced with an exponential drop to $510 billion due to 170 million shares that changed hands dropping Zuckerberg from 4th to 6th worldwide ranking.

Talking about the profit generation, the facts couldn’t cope up with the estimates worsening the situation. Though a rise of 41.9% comparative to the last year sales were observed, yet it doesn’t seem just enough to compensate for the striking loss. Moreover, it was under the analyst’s estimates. Furthermore, the company’s CFO, David Wehner predicts the slowdown of active users to continue and a 50-60% rise in the company’s expenses.

Our total revenue-growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018, and we expect our revenue growth rates to decline by high-single-digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4.

The $15 billion net worth loss appears to be shocking enough to raise questions on the young CEO’s position when most of the business minds and journalists think that he should step down. But that’s an evident fact that it is not going to happen.

The dropping of shares in March, due to the data breach controversy leading to the “#deleteFacebook” campaign, can also not be ignored. Causing a $35 billion loss then, posing thousands of questions on the data privacy of the users, the situation was a pretty hard challenge for the young billionaire which he managed to deal with quite impressively.

As I’ve said on past calls, we’re investing so much in security that it will significantly impact our profitability. We’re starting to see that this quarter.

Unlike other young billionaires, Zuckerberg instead of fretting or getting the loss to nerves, immediately took steps to minimize it. So, in my view, $15 billion net worth loss cannot subjugate the company’s progress witnessed in the quarterly reports of 2015, 16 and 17. The company seems to be prominently passing through a rough patch currently, but not rough enough to challenge the young enthusiast’s position, for he has been facing and handling a lot of crisis situations much wisely till yet. But the very fact of policies revision and devising of new strategies to bring the shareholders back into confidence for regaining of strength in the stock market holds good in the current scenario.