Edited by: TJVNews.com
CNBC’s Jim Cramer choked up during Thursday’s broadcast of “Squawk on the Street” as he apologized for previously encouraging viewers to buy shares of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, as was reported by the Washington Times.
The company’s share price plummeted nearly 25% in a single trading session Thursday, prompting the acceptance of responsibility from a visibly pained Cramer. By the close of trading Thursday, shares of Meta were trading at just below $98 a share, the lowest since 2016, the New York Post reported.
“Let me say this,” he told CNBC co-panelists, “I made a mistake here. I was wrong. I trusted this management team.” The clip of Cramer went viral on Twitter.
The Washington Times also reported that when CNBC colleague David Faber asked Cramer what he got wrong, he choked up as he replied: “What did I get wrong?”
“I trusted them, not myself,” he said, as was reported by the Washington Times. “For that, I regret. I’ve been in this business for 40 years, and I did a bad job. I’m not proud.”
The New York Post reported that in June, Cramer told his CNBC viewers that they ought to buy Meta stock because its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was “simply unstoppable.” Cramer touted the future of the metaverse, which is “a cool place to go.”
The CNBC segment from June 23 even included a metaverse avatar of Cramer and other network panelists, the Post reported.
Cramer appeared to be taken by Zuckerberg, back in June, gushing: “Mark knows I like to garden, I watched a garden” using the virtual reality headset that is used to access the metaverse, as was reported by the Post.
Cramer on Thursday especially criticized Meta for spending its cash reserves to invest in the metaverse.
“I had thought there’d be an understanding that you just can’t spend and spend right through your free cash flow, that there had to be some level of discipline,” he said, as was reported by the Washington Times.
The Post also reported that Meta announced on Wednesday that revenue dropped for the second consecutive quarter as the company struggles with falling advertising sales due to stiff competition from rising social media app TikTok.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-company earned $4.4 billion, or $1.64 per share, in the three-month period that ended September 30, according to the Post report. That’s down 52% from, $9.19 billion, or $3.22 per share, in the same period a year earlier.
Revenue fell 4% to $27.71 billion from $29.01 billion, slightly higher than the $27.4 billion that analysts had predicted.
The Post reported that Cramer has gained a reputation online as an untrustworthy prognosticator of the stock market as Twitter and Reddit trolls have frequently trended the term “Inverse Cramer” — the idea being that investors should do the opposite of whatever the CNBC personality recommends.
One fund manager, Tuttle Capital Management, has taken the concept further, filing prospectuses for two Cramer-tracking funds — the “Inverse Cramer ETF” and the “Long Cramer,” according to Nasdaq.
