According to a Bloomberg report, a staggering sum of $1.4 trillion was wiped out from the wealth of the world’s top 500 richest people.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Binance CEO Chanpeng Zhao, cumulatively saw a whopping $392 billion drop from their net worth.
Globally, the world’s billionaires lost nearly $2 trillion combined in 2022, while billionaires in the United States lost $660 billion collectively.
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In America’s billionaire list, Elon Musk lost the most, as his net worth dipped by about $115 billion this year according to Forbes.
Reports disclose that Musk has reportedly lost more than $130 billion from his net worth in 2022 as Tesla shares continue to fall, which his wealth is mostly tied to.
His net worth peaked at over $300 billion earlier this year, unfortunately, a 68% year-to-date decline in Tesla stock erased a huge chunk of that.
This saw him displaced from the number one position of the richest man in the world, overtaken by LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault.
Most of the losses accrued by these billionaires can be attributed to major macroeconomic events that happened in the year 2022, which also saw some shrewd investors lose their wealth.
Events such as the Russian-Ukraine war, high inflation, Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policy, the U.S. dollar’s strength, and hikes all affected the global economy as well as the stock market.
The uncertainty around each of them is creating challenges for investors, market experts, and investment strategists.
Meanwhile, despite the unfriendly economy of 2022, some investors made profit, which saw their fortune rise.
India’s billionaire and industrialist Gautam Adani, owner of the Adani Group, doubled his fortune in 2022 to $150 billion to become the richest man in India, and for a brief period, became the second richest person on the planet.
Also, several of the richest families in the world, such as the Kochs and the Mars family, saw an increase in their net worth this year.
Ultra-wealthy tech founders led a wipeout in fortunes that spanned the globe, though secretive families and pro sports owners emerged relatively unscathed.
For the vast majority of the world’s wealthiest people, 2022 was a year to forget. It’s not just the money that was lost, though it was staggering — almost $1.4 trillion was wiped from the fortunes of the richest 500 alone, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Plenty of the pain, it turns out, was self-inflicted: The alleged fraud by onetime crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried; the devastating war waged by Russia on Ukraine that spurred crippling sanctions on its business titans; and, of course, the antics of Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter who’s worth $138 billion less than he was on Jan. 1.