Zoom: From $160 Billion Pandemic Hero to 90% Stock Collapse

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]In 2020, Zoom went from 10 million daily users to 300 million in 4 months.

[00:00:06]Revenue rose 355% in a single quarter.

[00:00:10]The stock surged four-fold in a year. At its peak, the company was briefly worth nearly 160 billion. For a moment, it wasn't just a software company. It was global infrastructure. The entire world was running on Zoom. Two years later, roughly $140 billion of that value had disappeared. The company cut 15% of its workforce. A 14.7 billion acquisition to diversify the business collapsed because the falling stock price made the deal worthless to the company it was trying to buy. And in a leaked all hands meeting, the CEO of the company that defined remote work told his own companies they needed to come back to the office. That last detail says everything. When the founder of Zoom admitted his own product wasn't good enough for the work his company needed to do, he described without quite saying it the fundamental limit that the market had spent 2 years pricing in. The pandemic hadn't made video conferencing essential forever. It had just made it essential for a while. Zoom built a genuinely great product and handled one of the fastest growth surges in technology history remarkably well. The problem was never the software. The problem was that the market priced Zoom as though a temporary emergency was a permanent shift. And the company spent several years and tens of billions in market value learning the difference between a feature and a platform. If you like business and tech stories, follow for