NEW YORK (NewsNation Now) — Facebook parent company Meta’s overall value plunged by $237 billion— its largest drop ever in a single day — after its shares fell drastically when the social media giant reported a rare decline in profit because of a sharp increase in expenses.

To put that in perspective, $237 billion is worth more than Greece’s entire economy, and is the value of the entire National Football League, National Basketball Association and Major League baseball— combined.

On Thursday, Meta’s shares fell more than 26%.

This comes after Meta reported Wednesday that profit declined by 8% in the final three months of 2021, although revenue as a whole rose by 20% to $33.67 billion.

The reason for the decline could be Meta’s spending on virtual reality headsets and augmented reality technology for its Reality Labs segment, in which the company invested $10 billion in 2021.

Recent changes by Apple that make it harder for companies to track people for advertising purposes didn’t help decreasing profits, either.

Meta has been putting a lot of emphasis on the metaverse — which makes sense, as the company took on its new name last fall because of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on virtual and augmented reality.

But Wall Street famously dislikes uncertainty, and Facebook was already dealing with real-world issues as well, with whistleblowers saying the social media platform incites political violence, harms children and fuels misinformation. In July, President Joe Biden seemingly agreed, saying that Facebook is, “killing people” with misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.

“Meta is sacrificing its core business model for its fascination with the metaverse,” Rachel Jones, an analyst with the research firm GlobalData, told the Associated Press. “Betting big on the metaverse isn’t a bad thing — the technology is set to be huge and provide a multitude of opportunities — but it will take at least another decade to really get going.”

Apple, Google and Microsoft, Meta’s rivals, are taking on their own metaverse projects, as seen in Microsoft’s $70 billion purchase of game maker Activision Blizzard.

During a conference call Wednesday, Zuckerberg acknowledged that his fully realized vision is still a ways off, the AP reported.

“Although the direction is clear, our path is not perfectly defined,” he said.

This year, Meta’s investments will focus on Instagram Reels, Zuckerberg said, which are short-form videos similar to those seen on the app TikTok. He is also looking to invest in messaging, ads, commerce, privacy and artificial intelligence while continuing to work on “the metaverse.”

“Making meaningful progress across all seven of these areas is going to improve the services we offer today and will help power a social, intuitive, and entertaining metaverse,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook is also struggling: it reported its first-ever decline in daily active users in its 18-year history, as well.

Zuckerberg himself lost almost $30 billion, which was enough to knock him off the list for top 10 richest people in the world.