Mark Zuckerberg's wealth fell by close to 18 billion dollars on Thursday 30 July as Meta's share price dropped. The stock is down almost 18 percent since the start of the year, weighed by landmark court rulings and by unease about the scale of the company's spending on artificial intelligence.
Microsoft went the other way in the same reporting week, rising 15 percent after telling investors that Microsoft 365 Copilot now has more than 30 million paying users, up from 20 million in April. It restated its spending targets for the year rather than trimming them.
Read together, the two reactions describe the question the market is now asking of every large technology company. It is not whether to spend on artificial intelligence. It is whether the spending has arrived at revenue yet, and whether the company can name the customers who are paying for it.
Meta had been a stock that rarely showed vulnerability, and it recovered part of its losses earlier in the month with its best week in some time. The pattern since suggests investors have moved from rewarding ambition to asking for receipts, which is a harder standard and a more expensive one to miss.
