Mark Zuckerberg earns $12.5 billion in one day as he makes Meta pledge

While most of us wouldn't see a billion dollars if we lived to be 100, Mark Zuckerberg just made 12 times that much in a single day.

Meta lost more than $600 billion ($489b) in market value last year, but the company's shares were up more than 20 percent in after hours trading on Wednesday (1 February) after Zuckerberg discussed the year's earnings results.

“We’re working on flattening our org structure and removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster, as well as deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive,” Zuckerberg said. “There’s going to be some more that we can do to improve our productivity, speed and cost structure.”

He pledged that 2023 would be all about being more efficient, saying: “Our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency’ and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organisation."

Zuckerberg acknowledged to investors that the company's revenue grew sharply throughout each of its first 18 years, before adding: "And then obviously that changed very dramatically in 2022, where our revenue was negative growth for the first time in the company’s history … and we don’t anticipate that’s going to continue but I don’t necessarily think it’s going to go back to the way it was before.

“So I think this is a pretty rapid phase change there that I think just forced us to basically take a step back and say, okay, we can’t just treat everything like it’s hyper-growth,” Zuckerberg said.

The founder claimed the new mindset 'makes [Meta] better'.

Zuckerberg has also described how Meta trimmed spending on real estate and cancelled multiple data center projects as part of its changes.

Though Meta's revenue of nearly $32.2 billion (£26.2) in revenue is down four percent from the year prior, it's still ahead of the $31.5 billion (£25.7b) analysts had projected. For the first quarter of 2023, Meta expects revenue between $26 billion (£21.2b) and $28.5 billion (£23.2b).