The New Year is on the horizon, and you surely can’t blame the tech world for wanting 2022 to end.
It’s been a merciless year for tech stocks, with the Nasdaq 100 down 28% through mid-December. Several sectors took a particularly painful beating, including chipmakers, personal computer producers, and social media outfits. The cryptocurrency market crumbled under the weight of scandal and sloppiness. And through it all, Elon Musk did Elon Musk things.
Over the next few days, we’ll take stock in the year that was—starting today with a look at tech’s biggest losers of 2022, followed by its top winners—and peek ahead to the foggy forecast for the next 12 months.
(A preemptive note: You won’t see Musk on either list. Sure, he vastly overpaid for Twitter, saw Tesla hit some speed bumps, and became persona non grata on the political left. But he’s the most compelling, if overexposed, tech figure in the world right now, which counts for something.)
So without further ado, let’s start as always with the bad news: Data Sheet’s five companies, collectives, and individuals who will want to forget 2022 ever happened.
FTX’s venture capital investors
It’d be too easy to put Sam Bankman-Fried atop this list (even if he rightly deserves it). So let’s go with the deep-pocketed dolts who lavished the cryptocurrency charlatan with hundreds of millions of dollars in seed money for his house of cards, despite BIG BLARING WARNING SIGNS.
With each passing day, the evidence of FTX’s disorder and dysfunction comes into clearer view. Look no further than Tuesday’s testimony before Congress by current FTX CEO John Ray III, who sent social media atwitter by scoffing at the company’s use of QuickBooks for managing a billion-dollar enterprise.
Some investors saw the warning signs (props to you, Andreessen Horowitz). But the same can’t be said for Sequoia Capital (producer of the now-infamous SBF hagiography), Temasek, SoftBank, and dozens of others. Lesson learned? Doubtful.
Jack Dorsey
The onetime tech wunderkind saw his reputation sullied by bombshell whistleblower claims from a credible former executive, who alleged Dorsey essentially peaced out on his Twitter responsibilities before his resignation late last year.
Meanwhile, Dorsey now finds himself in the crosshairs of Democrats and Republicans alike. Liberals blame him for misguided faith in Musk’s takeover of Twitter, while conservatives see this month’s release of the Twitter Files as evidence of his capitulation to censorship and wokeness.
Oh, and shares of Block, the company he still runs, are down 56% this year.
Meta
Unlike years past, Meta didn’t do anything terribly wrong in 2022. It just didn’t do much right.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg continued plowing billions of dollars into the metaverse, an arguably defensible decision, but investors didn’t buy in. At the same time, Apple’s operating system privacy changes finally took hold, siphoning billions in ad revenue from the Facebook and Instagram parent company, and the global ad market cooled. It all adds up to a 64% decline in Meta’s stock price this year.
Somewhat quietly, Meta also had a pretty uneventful year on the product front. Neither Facebook nor Instagram generated much buzz, while the Meta Quest Pro virtual reality headset’s steep price tag ($1,499) overshadowed its mostly positive reviews.
Xi Jinping
China’s president faced turmoil at home and abroad, with little to show for his leadership.
The republic’s government-mandated COVID lockdowns contributed to a 25% drop in the Hang Seng Tech Index, a key barometer of major Chinese firms, and hastened Apple’s shift of production to neighboring Asian nations. Chinese companies would have fared even worse if not for the Xi administration somewhat easing up on last year’s punishing tech crackdown.
On the global stage, Xi has had no real response to President Joe Biden instituting sweeping export controls on advanced semiconductors to China, an aggressive step toward handicapping the republic’s tech industry. Meanwhile, Xi didn’t earn any friends in tech by continuing to support his warmongering neighbors to the north.
Carvana
Of all the so-called pandemic stocks that fell back to earth this year, nobody crashed more spectacularly than the Arizona-based online used car retailer.
Carvana shares are down 98% year to date (98%!) after a blockbuster 2021. Some of the car seller’s fortunes can be attributed to bad luck, namely the rapid rise in interest rates. But an ill-timed acquisition (the debt-financed purchase of vehicle auction company Adesa) and risky business strategy (building out for growth multiple months in advance) put Carvana on the road to disaster.
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Jacob Carpenter
