Mark Zuckerberg’s marathon defense of Facebook’s data practices in front of lawmakers this week paid off — sort of.
Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony helped Facebook’s stock — but the price still has a long road to recovery
What difference does 10 hours of testifying makes? About 5 percent.
Facebook
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Facebook stock is currently up about 5 percent since the start of the week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the CEO faced 10 hours of questioning from almost 100 politicians in two hearings. (You can watch it all here.) Judging from the stock price jump, he did a good job.
But it’s going to take a lot more investor confidence for the social media company to reestablish its former stock price. The stock is still down 11 percent since news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal came out. Put another way, Zuckerberg’s testimony erased only a third of the stock’s losses.
On March 17, the Guardian and the New York Times both published stories showing that voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest data on 50 million — now 87 million — Facebook profiles without user permission. Those stories helped send the stock tumbling from $185 the day before to a daily low of $152 at the end of March. It has yet to recover. The stock is currently trading at around $165.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
