FOR MARK ZUCKERBERG, the first three quarters of last year were rough. In July 2022 his social-media empire, Meta, announced its first ever year-on-year decline in quarterly revenues. Three months later it reported another. Investors sneered at his expensive pivot from a lucrative ads business to the untested realm of the metaverse, on which Mr Zuckerberg was splurging $10bn a year. By November Meta had lost roughly three-fifths of its market value since its peak of $1.1trn in August 2021, when the covid-19 pandemic meant that much of daily life was being lived online. Shortly after he sacked 11,000 people, or 13% of its workforce.
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