Dividend of 700 million from Meta to Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, will receive a payment of around $700 million from the social media giant's first-ever dividend. On February 4, 2004, a Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, together with a group of friends, introduced a social network called The Facebook into the university world .

Initially limited to a few American universities, the platform quickly expanded to become a global presence, paving the way for the proliferation of social media. This event marks a revolution in society, influencing concepts such as privacy, friendship, information, politics and work, and giving rise to new like-oriented professions. And the concept of real and virtual has been redefined, in the future more than ever with artificial intelligence and the metaverse, in which minors are the most exposed.

The first dividend in history

Meta announced a quarterly cash dividend of 50 cents per share for its Class A and B common stock, starting in March. The group's advertising revenue continues to run at full speed and the Facebook and Instagram company pays its first dividend since it was born. Revenue increased to $40.1 billion year-on-year, Meta announced after the U.S. stock market closed.

Final profit rose from $4.6 billion a year ago to $14 billion. “We had a good quarter as our customer base and business continue to grow,” said Zuckerberg himself, founder and CEO of Meta. “We have made a lot of progress in our vision for the advancement of artificial intelligence and the metaverse.” At the same time, the company continues to invest in the development of virtual worlds.

The Metaverse is a flop

The company has also invested in Reality Labs, the division that works on mixed reality viewers and, inevitably like other big names, in the artificial intelligence sector. "In the next few years, Facebook will change due to the introduction of generative artificial intelligence functions. Many posts will be created with the help of AI and we will have bots that will be at our service", explained social media experts, who imagines an "increasingly immersive future with three-dimensional social spaces.

This will impose new rules and precautions". Facebook-Meta's current challenge, in addition to AI, is to comply with European standards. Together with five other multinationals (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Bytedance and Microsoft) it is under the spotlight of the Digital Markets Act which from March 7 will introduce stricter rules to contain anti-competitive practices. For users it means being able to stop sharing their information between Meta services.

Again to comply with Brussels, since November the company has launched subscriptions in Europe for users who no longer want to be tracked by advertising. A definitive farewell to the principle "It's free and forever" that stood out on the Facebook welcome page, already replaced in 2019 with a more hasty "It's fast and simple".

Reality Labs' operating loss, however, widened to $ 4.65 billion from $4.3 billion a year earlier. Meanwhile, the division's revenue rose from $727 million to just under $1.1 billion. Investors had repeatedly expressed concern that Meta was spending too much money on a technology with uncertain profit prospects. Doubts grew during periods last year when the online advertising business as a whole slowed down.

The losses are also significant, at 4.65 billion dollars, but as has happened in the past they are linked to the heavy investments that the American company is making for the realization of all the announced projects. It's also interesting to note that Oculus virtual reality headsets represent only a small portion of Meta's overall revenue, which continues to be driven by the advertising division. The subscriptions launched a few months ago which allow you to obtain profile verification on Facebook and Instagram, however, have not yet been seen in the quarterly report as a sign of how they represent a very small part of the revenue.

Zuckerberg, who announced that Meta will not launch its own app store on iOS due to the high costs required by Apple, defined the one just ended as "a good quarter", during which the company "made a lot of progress in our vision for AI and the metaverse”. However, the company has forecast an increase in the operating losses of the Reality Lab due to investments in the creation of products. Suffice it to say that in the fourth quarter, investments in research and development grew by 8%.

Collection for Mark

With about 350 million shares in hand, the announced dividend pool will mean that Zuckerberg would take home about $175 million in each pre-tax quarterly payment, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. So an annual revenue of 700 million. Meta's move to pay a dividend is a signal to the market about its growth potential. Often, the fastest-growing technology companies eschew dividends in favor of using profits to develop new products or make expensive acquisitions. While Meta is investing heavily in AI initiatives, its prospects for acquisitions are diminishing. And then the cash is redistributed to the members.

There are 2.11 billion active users on Facebook every day

Twenty years later, Facebook, despite shocks and scandals - one for all the Cambridge Analytica case - and the migration of younger people who perceive it as the social network of the 'boomers', remains the longest-running and largest platform from the numerical: according to the latest quarterly data, announced by the company in the last few hours, 2.11 billion people are active on the platform every day in the world, 3.07 billion every month.

In October 2021, Facebook – the company not the app – changed its name to Meta to embrace the metaverse and a new life. Facebook brought the Internet into the participatory phase with user-generated content and continues to dominate the market. He traced a model for the platforms that came later with the bulletin board, his own showcase with photos and videos; the news flow personalized by the algorithm. And above all by introducing the concept of like, a gratification for our actions that generates dopamine and money.

Over the years, Facebook has started a shopping campaign. Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp since 2014 which together with Messenger (launched in 2011) are part of Zuckerberg's empire to which Time dedicated its cover in 2010. An ecosystem that has also included Threads, the anti-Twitter, for a few months. The company landed on Wall Street in 2012 with one of the largest public offerings in the US.