Investors reportedly disgruntled as Facebook stock down 70%, company out $800 billion in market cap

Investors in Facebook parent company Meta are reportedly growing dissatisfied with the company's fixation on the "metaverse" as the corporations' stock continues to plunge and its market capitalization continues a long slide.

The company has seen its stock plummet throughout 2022, shedding more than 70% of its value from the start of the year as it fell from over $330 per share in January to nearly $90 per share this week. 

The company's market cap has also plunged from its high last year, dropping from just over $1 trillion in August of 2021 to under $250 billion in November. 

Investors, meanwhile, are reported to be unhappy with the company's business direction, specifically founder Mark Zuckerberg's fixation on the virtual reality "metaverse," a project that has generated relatively little excitement outside of esoteric tech circles.

Jim Tierney, an investment officer for Meta shareholder AllianceBernstein, told the Financial Times that, had any other company plowed so much money into a strategically dubious project, "you’d have activist investors writing letters, proposing alternative slates of directors, demanding change."

"I think Mark heard crystal clear what investors wanted. He’s made his decision," Tierney told the publication.

David Older, an asset manager at Carmignac, claimed that Zuckerberg has been "tone-deaf to the investment community, doubling down on everything."

“The timeline for the metaverse is very stretched. I don’t think you’re going to know if it is the right move for five or 10 years," he told FT.

Meta, meanwhile, told FT that the company "value[s] the opinions of our investors and regularly engage with them to ensure we’re aware of their respective perspectives.”