Elon Musk has been toppled from his position as the world’s wealthiest person after losing $39bn of his net worth in a year, according to Forbes’s annual “World’s Billionaire List”.
The Tesla and Twitter CEO was overtaken by Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, the French luxury goods company, whose net worth increased by $53bn in the past year to reach $211bn, compared to Musk’s $180bn.
Forbes attributed Musk’s loss of the top spot to his “pricey acquisition of Twitter”, which led to a 50% drop in Tesla’s shares.
Tesla had its worst year on Wall Street in 2022, losing $700bn due to investor concerns about Covid’s impact in China and Elon Musk’s controversial purchase of Twitter.
Musk’s acquisition of the microblogging site for $44bn was primarily funded by selling shares of his electric car company, causing Tesla’s shares to drop by almost 50%.
Although Tesla has recovered some of those losses this year, its current market value is still lower than its value before the Twitter takeover.
Musk has jokingly referred to the acquisition as buying “the world’s largest non-profit” and Forbes suggested that his controversial tweets have contributed to his loss of the top spot in the billionaire rankings.
In November, Musk stated that Twitter was losing $4m per day.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, slipped to third place. After losing $57bn due to a nearly 40% drop in the share price of his e-commerce giant, Amazon founder Bezos now has a net worth of $114bn, placing him in third position on Forbes’s annual “World’s Billionaire List”.
In addition, there has been a significant decrease in the number of billionaires worldwide, with Forbes reporting a decline of 28, from 2,668 to 2,640, compared to last year.
The total net worth of all billionaires on the planet has also fallen from $12.7tn to $12.2tn, a decrease of $500bn, according to the report.
