Meta is worth less than Home Depot now

Facebook parent company Meta’s shares fell 24.6% on Thursday after it announced a drop in quarterly revenue, bringing its total value under that of a relatively old-fashioned compatriot – Home Depot.

The company’s shares closed at $97.94 due to continued pressure from TikTok and Apple's recent ad-privacy changes, which wiped out almost $85 billion of the tech giant’s market value. The stock is down more than 70% in 2022 alone, reports The Wall Street Journal.

James Crombie, a senior editor at Bloomberg, noted that this put the social media company’s value below that of Home Depot, a much older corporation dealing largely in physical goods.

“Facebook’s worth less than Home Depot,” he tweeted, along with a graph that compared Meta and Home Depot’s total market capitalization, or value of outstanding stock.

Facebook's worth less than Home Depot pic.twitter.com/3nfsalJ05u

— James Crombie (@jtcrombie) October 27, 2022

Meta’s market value was now down to around $260 billion, a level not seen since 2016. Home Depot, whose shares closed at $291.06 on Thursday, had a total market cap of almost $300 billion.

The interesting comparison was a moment of levity in a tough week for tech stocks. Online retailer Amazon’s stock price fell over 20% in after-hours trading after it released its third-quarter earnings report. Google parent Alphabet’s shares also slumped to a near-52-week-low on Wednesday and Microsoft’s fell 7.7% after warning investors that it expected PC sales and growth in its cloud business to slow.

Meta investors also remain skeptical of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality "metaverse," which the company spent $10 billion on last year. 

Twitter will be taken off the New York Stock Exchange if SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk completes his $44 billion purchase by Friday as expected. Banks have begun turning over the cash he needs to complete the deal after he sent them a funding notice, signaling his intent to close the deal, according to The Wall Street Journal.