It is no secret that Mark Zuckerberg has gone all in on the metaverse. In fact, he’s so committed to the development of the metaverse that he rebranded Facebook as Meta. While Zuckerberg is sold on the future of the metaverse, it does not appear that the company’s shareholders share his excitement. Last month, Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital, a firm that owns a significant number of Meta shares, published a letter criticizing the company’s costly investment into the metaverse.
“Meta has drifted into the land of excess — too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency. This lack of focus and fitness is obscured when growth is easy but deadly when growth slows and technology changes,” Gerstner wrote.
“The facts are startling. In the last 18 months, Meta stock is down 55% (compared to an average of 19% for its big-tech peers). Your P/E ratio has fallen from 23x to 12x and now trades at less than half the average P/E of your peers. And notably, this decline in share price mirrors the lost confidence in the company, not just the bad mood of the market.”
Just a few weeks after Gerstner’s letter was published, The Leak issued a report claiming that Zuckerberg would resign due to intense pressure from investors and shareholders.
“Our insider source, privy to plans at Meta, informs us that Zuckerberg is set to resign next year,” the report reads.
Hours after the report was published, Meta Communications Director Andy Stone tweeted, “This is false.” Despite pushback from Stone and Meta, The Leak stands by its story.
“Due to META’s official response, stating that the leaked information is false, I have decided to change the headline from ‘Mark Zuckerberg is set to resign next year’ to ‘A Leak States Mark Zuckerberg is set to resign next year.’ However, given our understanding of the source and the quotes we’ve obtained, we continue to stand by the information presented in the report,” the publication stated.
