Financial News 29th September (Editor: Niu Zhanlin) With the social media giant Meta's stock price hitting a record high, its CEO Zuckerberg's net worth exceeded $200 billion, ranking as the world's fourth richest person, and could surpass Amazon founder Bezos and LVMH Chairman Bernard Arnault at any time.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg's wealth surged by an astonishing $73.4 billion this year, bringing his total net assets to $201 billion.

The world's richest person, Musk, still leads with a net worth of $272 billion, followed closely by Bezos, who has $211 billion in wealth. Arnault's wealth has recently surged, and his total assets have also reached $207 billion.

In fact, Zuckerberg's ranking as the fourth richest person globally is also related to China. After a series of policies supporting the high-quality development of the economy in China were intensively introduced, driving a strong overall performance of European luxury goods stocks, Arnault's wealth surged by $17.1 billion on that Thursday.

Zuckerberg is not the only tech tycoon whose wealth has significantly increased this year. NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison's net assets increased by $62.2 billion and $58.6 billion in 2024 respectively.

At the age of 40, Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, with much of his wealth linked to Meta's stocks. As of 2024, Meta's stock price has soared by nearly 61%. On Thursday, Meta's share price reached a historical high of $577.

Meta operates the global popular social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, as well as the instant messaging app WhatsApp.

Leader in the AI industry.

At this week's annual Meta Connect conference, the company unveiled the latest virtual reality (VR) headset Quest 3S, starting at $299. In addition, Meta also revealed a multimodal large language model and AR glasses prototype.

Zuckerberg stated that Meta AI is poised to become the most widely used AI assistant in the world. "Our monthly active users are close to 0.5 billion, and we haven't even launched Meta AI in some larger countries yet."

Meta has been striving to catch up with competitors in the AI field, including large tech companies like Microsoft and Google, as well as startups and AI leader OpenAI.

Analysts believe that Meta is in a favorable position in the AI competition. JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth said, "The Meta Connect conference reflects the company's ambitions to shape the industry, and Meta's stock price is expected to further rise to $640."

Jefferies analyst wrote, "Zuckerberg showcased Meta's development direction at Meta Connect, which makes us more bullish about Meta's future. On the enterprise side, its Llama is becoming a strong competitor, and we see the momentum brought by its newly launched multimodal large language model. Meta's stock price is expected to further rise to $600."