Meta (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday unveiled new plans for the company's turn toward the metaverse, introducing company values like "live in the future" and telling employees they'll be referred to as "metamates."
Shares of Meta ticked up slightly on the day but the company's stock remains about 31% below where it stood upon the release of disappointing earnings at the outset of the month.
Observers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley have attributed the sudden collapse to sluggish user growth, the uncertain bet on the metaverse, and new Apple (AAPL) privacy settings that limit the effectiveness of targeted ads.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen, however, tells Yahoo Finance in a new interview that the stock decline owes to a deeper central reason: lies she says the company told about its products.
Haugen, a former Meta product manager who left the company last year and leaked thousands of internal documents, said the collapse in the value of the shares exemplifies the way inaccurate public statements from the company — which Haugen refers to by its former name "Facebook" — have hurt everyday investors.
"When Facebook misleads people about the value of the company — and when you lie about material issues, you're lying about the value of the company," she says. "People get hurt."
"People's retirements get wiped out," she adds. "People got deeply hurt by this stuff."
"We forget the emotional side, and we forget that it's real people's lives," she says.
In October, Haugen ...
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