Roughly doubling its year-to-date trading after reporting its second-quarter earnings, Facebook stocks surged by more than $7 per share up to $76 per share and nudged Mark Zuckerberg's net worth by at least $1.6 billion.
That leaves Zuckerberg now sitting in the 16th spot on Bloomberg's billionaire rankings, bypassing Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the list.
While Wall Street expected Facebook to report healthy numbers during the social network's latest earnings report, the market still needed to see numbers before it re-evaluated the the company's shares.
Zuckerberg's net worth hovered around $33.3 billion, Page's at $33.1 billion and Brin's was around $32.8 billion. Bill Gates topped the list of billionaires with a net worth of $84.7 billion, according to Bloomberg. As rare as it is to be a billionaire, Zuckerberg has now achieved the even rarer feat of accruing more billions than years of age.
Facebook served an average of 829 million active users each day during the second quarter of 2014, up by 19 percent when compared with the same period in 2013, according to its earnings report (PDF). Usage of its mobile platform climbed 39 percent, year-to-year, as it was used by approximately 654 million individuals during the second quarter.
All of that traffic to its desktop and mobile platforms earned the site a 61 percent increase in revenue, year-to-year, stated Facebook's second-quarter earnings report. Of the $2.91 billion in revenue, $2.61 billion came from advertising and 62 percent of the ad dollars were generated from its mobile platform.
While Google's stock has risen roughly 7.5 percent over the last 12 months, Facebook's value has swelled by 181 percent over the same time period. While Google was still valued higher than Facebook, the social network's trajectory could someday see it pass the search engine.
Both Google and Facebook have branched out from their core services with a lot of promising tech, which makes its fairly subjective to state where the two will lie long-term.
Google has worked to build an ecosystem for its products and services, with recent acquisitions such as the purchase of Nest and the unveiling of its smart hardware. Facebook has focused primarily on buying up apps, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, but has recently tested the hardware market with its acquisition of the Oculus virtual reality headset. And if the masses of gamers are correct, Facebook could extend its social networking platform on the VR headset and attract even more masses to the technology.
