Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, got into the most exclusive circle of the rich. His assets are currently worth more than $ 100 billion, and only two other people have overcome that goal – Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Zuckerberg’s success was confirmed by a billionaire index from Bloomberg, where the creator of Facebook took third place.
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On Wednesday, Facebook launched the addition of Reels to the social network Instagram, which belongs to Facebook. This is a direct competitor to the TikTok application, which US President Trump would like to put an end to. On Thursday night, Trump signed an executive order banning TikTok in the United States, which was no doubt helped by Reels’ release.
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Perfect moment
“It created almost perfect conditions for the release of improvements on Instagram,” he told pro CNN Joe Gagliese, CEO of marketing company Viral Nation. Trump gave Chinese company ByteDance (owner of TikToku) 45 days to sell his business to an American company. If this succeeds, the application can continue to operate in the United States. TikTok is now negotiating a purchase with Microsoft.
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On Facebook the day after the Reels performance, shares jumped by more than six percent. Zuckerberg still holds a 13% stake in the company, so its assets suddenly have grown to the 100 billion mark.
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Inspired by Instagram
Instagram Reels are an almost faithful copy of TikTok. Users can create 15-second videos in which they danced and recorded short sketches at the show. Similarly, Instagram imitated the Snapchat application in 2016, when it added the Stories service to its application. Eight months later, Instagram Stories surpassed the original Snapchat by the number of users.
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“In the past, we have recognized that we are inspired by other companies,” said Reels Vishal Shah, head of product at Instagram, at the show.
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TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer calls Reels “another copied product” in a press release declaration at the end of July. In it, Mayer also assures that TikTok is not an enemy to American citizens.
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A week before the launch of Reels, Facebook released its message on income. Due to the high demand for pandemic measures, Facebook registered 2.7 billion active users. Compared to last year, this is a 12% improvement. If users from all Facebook-owned platforms are counted, the number of users will jump to three billion.
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The company also recorded record sales of nearly $ 60 billion, an increase of 11 percent – despite an advertising boycott by some large US companies for allegedly not combating misinformation.
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One third of the US economy
Since the beginning of the year, the company’s share price has risen by almost 30 percent, allowing Zuckerberg to add another $ 22 billion to his assets. But the first in earnings this year is Jeff Bezos, who increased his fortune by an incredible $ 75 billion.
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During the pandemic, when the entire market collapsed, the technology giants gained strength. According to the British BBC The five largest technology companies in the United States, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft, have a market valuation of 30 percent of US GDP. Compared to 2018, the share almost doubled.
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Apple could be the first company to break the mythical mark of $ 2 trillion in market value in the coming days, the Web notes The Guardian.
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Technology giants at the interrogation
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook spoke at the US Congress last month to explain their companies’ practices. Zuckerberg attended a similar hearing in 2018, but it ended in a debacle for American politicians, when it turned out that he hardly understood the functioning of society, as the web writes. The Atlantic.
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They have already learned from their mistakes and attacked the bosses because of the monopoly behavior of their companies much more effectively than in the past. This time, politicians were able to push corporate executives into trouble when, for example, Jeff Bezos acknowledged his company’s monopoly.
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