Michael Hiltzik: Is this the beginning of Facebook's downfall?
If there's a single immutable law in human biology, it's that no one lives forever. The same goes for corporations.
The latest big company to confront the fact that the Grim Reaper spares no one and no thing is Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook.
Meta on Thursday suffered the largest one-day loss in U.S. stock market history, following an unexpectedly sour report of fourth-quarter earnings.
The company's chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, tried to reassure employees and investors that he and his management team had matters in hand for the long term.
It's true that Meta remains a potent force in the tech space. The stock traded midday Monday around $225, about where it was as recently as late June 2020, and its current market capitalization of $659 billion is the seventh-largest among U.S. companies. Some market strategists say it may be undervalued at the current price.
But it's also possible that the
