Zuckerberg loses $29B as Meta's AI spending spooks investors

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suffered a devastating $29.2 billion loss to his net worth on October 30, 2025, plummeting from third to fifth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in what ranks as the fourth-largest single-day market-driven wealth decline ever recorded. The dramatic fall came as Meta's stock tumbled 11% following investor alarm over the company's aggressive artificial intelligence spending plans and a massive one-time tax charge.​

Zuckerberg's fortune now sits at $235.2 billion, according to Bloomberg's wealth index, allowing Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Alphabet's Larry Page to overtake him in the rankings. The Meta founder had not ranked this low among the world's wealthiest individuals in nearly two years.​

###AI Investment Concerns Drive Market Selloff

The wealth destruction originated from Meta's third-quarter earnings report, which revealed plans to dramatically escalate AI infrastructure spending. The company announced capital expenditures could reach $70-72 billion in 2025, with CEO Zuckerberg warning that costs would grow "significantly faster" in 2026. Meta simultaneously launched a record-breaking $30 billion bond sale to fund its AI ambitions—the largest investment-grade corporate bond offering in the United States since 2023.

"We consistently observe a trend where we establish a certain level of infrastructure based on what we perceive as an ambitious estimate, only to find that demand continues to grow," Zuckerberg explained during the earnings call. The company is "aggressively" building capacity in anticipation of achieving superintelligence capabilities.​

Despite the stock market's harsh reaction, bond investors demonstrated confidence in Meta's strategy, oversubscribing the debt offering by more than four times with $125 billion in orders. This disconnect between equity and debt markets highlighted growing investor discrimination regarding AI spending returns.

###Trump Tax Bill Creates Additional Drag

Meta's earnings per share of $1.05 fell dramatically short of the $6.72 analysts had projected, largely due to a one-time tax charge of approximately $16 billion related to President Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act". The comprehensive tax legislation, signed into law on July 4, 2025, permanently extended individual tax cuts from Trump's first term while implementing various new provisions.​

Without the tax charge, Meta indicated its earnings would have reached $7.25 per share, exceeding Wall Street expectations. Despite the earnings miss, Meta's revenue of $51.2 billion surpassed estimates of $49.5 billion.​

The billionaire rankings reshuffling reflects broader market skepticism about massive AI infrastructure investments across Big Tech. As one analysis noted, current AI revenue generation totals only $15-20 billion annually across all major technology companies, while accumulated depreciation from $400 billion in projected 2025 AI spending reaches approximately $40 billion.