David Zalubowski
It’s a good week to be Mark Zuckerberg.
The Meta CEO saw his net worth surge to a record high following blockbuster Meta earnings on Wednesday.
Zuckerberg’s net worth is $271 billion as of Thursday, up $26.8 billion from the day prior, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He joined the $200 billion club in September and is currently the third-richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg’s index, behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
Meta’s shares were up more than 12% in after-hours trading during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, hitting an all-time high of $780. This was after Meta beat estimates on revenue and earnings per share.
The earnings call was heavily focused on the company’s AI ambitions. Zuckerberg shared his vision of building “personal superintelligence” for everyone, which he’d outlined in a letter posted hours before the earnings call.
On the call, he talked about Meta’s multibillion-dollar hiring spree to build out its nascent Superintelligence Labs team, saying “small talent-dense teams” are the “optimal configuration for driving frontier research” in AI.
He also praised glasses as “the ideal form factor for AI” and went so far as to say it’d be a “significant cognitive disadvantage” not to wear AI-enabled glasses in the future. The company sells Meta Ray-Ban glasses and unveiled Oakley Meta eyewear in June. It also showed off a prototype of its augmented reality Orion glasses in September.
When asked if Meta would continue open-sourcing on AI, Zuckerberg said the company likely would, but some considerations might change that.
“We’re getting models that are so big that they’re just not practical for a lot of other people to use. So we kind of wrestle with whether it’s productive or helpful to share that, or if that’s really just primarily helping competitors or something like that,” he said.
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