PAAs if Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t rich enough, the Facebook founder made another whopping $27.3 billion in 2019 alone.
Just to add a bit of salt to the wound, he’s only the fifth wealthiest person. Jeff Bezos’ net worth is $116 billion – I mean, I’m not sure I even have £166 after Christmas.
Despite 35-year-old Zuckerberg’s controversies this year, he still gained 1.81% from is 2018 earnings, taking his total wealth to $79.4 billion.
PAAccording to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, also sitting pretty at the top is Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, and Warren Buffet.
Bezos sits in the number one spot with his ginormous $116 billion net worth, followed closely by Bill Gates, who’s net worth is $113 billion.
Eight of the top 10 billionaires are from the US, with the other two being Spanish and French. Only one woman made the top 10 – Julia Flesher Koch, of Koch Industries, who ranked in 10th place.
In recent months, Zuckerberg has been under fire about political adverts on Facebook and his decision to not take them down if the ads contained false information – compared to Twitter owner Jack Dorsey, who banned political ads all together.
PAIn a series of Tweets, Dorsey said:
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019
In comparison to this, Zuckerberg has quite a different view and approach to the matter.
According to The Guardian, he said:
What I believe is that in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgements.
And, you know, I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news.
But despite Zuckerberg’s bold decision to continue allowing political adds – whether they’re incorrect or not – it obviously hasn’t affected his income.
PAZuckerberg hit back at his critics who argued he kept the political adds for monetary purposes, which Zuckerberg said only estimated to makes 0.5% of Facebook’s income.
In a statement, he said:
Some people accuse us of allowing this speech because they think all we care about is making money. That’s wrong. I can assure you, from a business perspective, the controversy this creates far outweighs the very small percent of our business that these political ads make up. We estimate these ads from politicians will be less than 0.5% of our revenue next year.
Whether you love him, or hate him, he’s a still very, very rich man. Political ads or not, I don’t think his net worth will be changing anytime soon.
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Niamh Shackleton is a pint sized person and journalist at UNILAD. After studying Multimedia Journalism at the University of Salford, she did a year at Caters News Agency as a features writer in Birmingham before deciding that Manchester is (arguably) one of the best places in the world, and therefore moved back up north. She’s also UNILAD’s unofficial crazy animal lady.