Facebook, one of the world’s most valuable companies, saw its market value drop a whopping $120 billion in a single day after its uncharacteristically bad earnings this week. That’s a record drop among U.S. companies in the S&P 500. In fact, its drop in perceived value is bigger than the entire value of more than 90 percent of the companies in the S&P 500.
Facebook’s stock drop hurt the rest of the tech industry — except Google
The company’s $120 billion market value loss reverberated throughout the industry.
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.
For context, here’s where that drop ranked among the biggest one-day market cap losses of all time among the current S&P 500:
You’d think Facebook’s pain would be good news for the social media giant’s competitors, especially those vying for its digital ad revenue dollars. But for many major tech stocks, that hasn’t been the case this week. Twitter and Facebook, both of which had disappointing earnings, saw the biggest drops. But that stock share decline is echoed in other tech companies.
The main exception is Alphabet — Facebook’s biggest competitor for digital ad dollars — whose stellar earnings sent its stock up about 5 percent this week.
Perhaps Wall Street is worried that Facebook’s data privacy issues will put more scrutiny on other internet companies, raising their costs and eating into profit — although that’s been the case for some time now. Or perhaps it’s just scary for investors to see a successful tech leader brought down, souring them on the whole industry.
Keep in mind: Facebook is still worth $622 billion.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
