A whopping $480 billion in paper wealth, owned by the world’s top tech moguls, has vanished into thin air! The world’s 20 richest tech billionaires including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates witnessed their fortunes shrink this year amid the stock market’s sharp tumble.
Tesla chief and now the new owner of Twitter – Elon Musk – has lost $66.4 billion in net worth this year with his loss on Friday along being $7.81 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the richest people in the world.
Tesla boss and the world’s richest man Musk on Thursday became the new owner on the microblogging site as he completed the Twitter takeover.
Amazon founder Bezos’ fortune suffered a $7.37 billion hit on Friday and has now slipped to the third spot of the index. His net worth has declined by $65.7 billion this year. The wealth of Bezos is valued at $127 billion. Amazon’s shares tanked about 8 per cent on Friday as Wall Street was disappointed with the company’s sales forecast for the current quarter.
The $480 billion collective loss is even more than the market values of all but seven companies in the S&P 500, the Wall Street Journal reported. The loss can be attributed to disappointing earnings reports from a host of tech giants this week including Amazon, Meta. The muted numbers have only fuelled recession fears, pressured stock prices to go lower.
As Meta stock tumbled nearly 25 per cent on Thursday, sinking to its lowest point since December 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth fell by $11.2 billion on the day. So far this year, the wealth of Meta’s chief executive has fallen by more than $87 billion. Zuckerberg has now dropped to the 28th position on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His fortune is down from a peak of $102 billion in August 2020, when he the third richest on the index.
The decline in tech firms’ revenues, which were cheerful before the Covid-19 pandemic, is now feeling the pinch of high inflation, rising interest rates and slowing digital advertising growth. This has forced many big companies to control costs, monitor head count or even lay off staff.
Like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has also suffered a $27.3 billion in his net worth this year and is now the fifth most-richest billionaire.
Google parent Alphabet Inc. co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are among the 10 richest people in the world, have also seen their net worth drop. Both have lost over $40 billion in paper wealth this year after Alphabet reported its first-ever drop in YouTube year-over-year ad sales.
While most of these richest tech moguls are from America, a few are from the outside including China’s richest man Jack Ma. He is known for developing his e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. from scratch into one of China’s largest business empires.
Ma has lost $9.3 billion in wealth this year, according to the Bloomberg index, and currently has a net worth of less than $30 billion. United States Technology
