Meta Platforms shares were declining on Monday after the company made history with the biggest-ever one-day gain in market value last week. It shouldn’t put too much of a dampener on the celebrations of the 20th birthday of its Facebook social network.
Meta
shares were down 2.7% at $462.14 in early trading, after a 20% gain on Friday following its blockbuster earnings report. Still, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other stockholders have reason to be feeling cheerful after the social media company emerged as the standout of Big Tech’s earnings week, outshining even
Microsoft
and
Amazon.com.
Meta is now worth around $1.22 trillion, after starting as a dorm-room project of Zuckerberg’s in February 2004. The company went public as Facebook in 2012 and priced its shares at $38.
Zuckerberg posted a celebratory video of Facebook’s 20th anniversary on Sunday. Meanwhile, the gain in Meta’s valuation moved him to fourth place on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, overtaking Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Elsewhere in tech,
Apple’s
Vision Pro mixed-reality headset hit stores on Friday. Unsurprisingly, the weekend saw a flood of videos on social media of users wearing the device at home and in public—including a viral video that appeared to show a person wearing it while driving a
Tesla
Cybertruck. Apple hasn’t publicly revealed Vision Pro sales figures but company-watching site MacRumors said it had sold more than 200,000 units ahead of the store release, citing a source with knowledge of the matter.
“We believe Vision Pro sales have been very strong over the weekend and gives us further confidence in our 600,000 unit target for 2024 (up originally from our 460,000 estimate before preorders),” wrote Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives in a research note on Monday.
Apple couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the report.
Ives, a noted tech bull on Wall Street, has a target price of $250 on Apple stock and an Outperform rating. Apple shares were up 0.5% at $186.72. They were little changed from before the company’s earnings report. That was when the company guided for March quarter revenue to fall 5% from a year earlier to about $90 billion, with a drop of nearly 10% in iPhone sales.
The
Nasdaq Composite Index
was down 0.3% on Monday, while the
S&P 500
was down 0.3%.
Farther afield, a South Korean court on Monday acquitted
Samsung Electronics
Chairman Lee Jae-yong of financial crimes involving a historic contentious merger, Lee’s lawyers said. Samsung shares closed down 1.2% in local trading.
In Europe, Yandex, the owner of Russia’s largest search engine and ride-hailing service, said it had agreed to sell its operations in the country for 475 billion rubles ($5.22 billion) to a consortium of Russian investors including oil major Lukoil.
Write to Adam Clark at [email protected]
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