Chief Financial Officer David Wehner has warned of impending financial doom at Facebook so many times that this column has dubbed him “the Chicken Little of Silicon Valley.”
But this time, the sky may actually be falling.
Meta Platforms Inc. shares
FB,
plunged nearly 23% in Wednesday’s extended session after another warning from Wehner, who has overshadowed strong results for years with concerns about slowing growth that never really arrived. This time, however, the CFO’s caution arrived with other worrisome signs: Facebook’s first-ever quarterly decline in active users, competition that is actually managing to hurt the dominant social network, and an assault from the biggest company in the world — not to mention an earnings and forecast miss.
There was also a big negative number: $10 billion, which is…
