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Mark Zuckerberg (on January 31st)
Photo: Roberto Schmidt / AFP
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's enthusiasm for martial arts is forcing the meta-group he leads to issue an unusual warning to investors. Zuckerberg and several other managers participated in "high-risk activities such as martial arts, extreme sports and recreational flying" that could "lead to serious injury and death," Meta noted in the detailed report for last year published over the weekend.
It is the first time that the Facebook Group has included such a reference to its boss's hobbies in its usual risk warnings for investors. As before, Meta also emphasized that if Zuckerberg were no longer available for whatever reason, this would have “significant negative consequences” for the business.
Zuckerberg has control over Meta thanks to shares with more voting rights than ordinary investors - and still has a leading role in determining the company's strategy. Meta has billions of users on its services such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Numbers are good – Meta pays its first dividend
These days Facebook is celebrating its 20th birthday. Shortly before, founder Zuckerberg had to be accused by a US senator of having “blood on his hands”. It was in a hearing on the safety of children online - and Zuckerberg apologized to affected parents in the Senate chamber. The next day he announced a 25 percent jump in sales and a quarterly profit for the parent company Meta of $14 billion, three times more than a year earlier. Meta now wants to pay a quarterly dividend for the first time and has set it at 50 US cents.
Most recently, 3.98 billion users accessed one of Meta's apps at least once a month - and 3.19 billion even accessed them daily. The flagship Facebook had a good three billion users monthly and 2.11 billion every day. These are huge numbers, especially considering a global population of around eight billion people - not all of whom are still online.
jok/dpa