Tech billionaires’ fortunes will melt in 2022 (except for the TikTok boss)
From Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, this year’s stock market crash has cost big names in tech billions.
The collapse of American tech giants in the stock market in 2022 cost the planet’s biggest fortune tens of billions of dollars. Here is the list of billionaires who lost the most dollars this year:
Elon Musk
Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, who has been at the top of the ranking of the world’s richest people for a long time, gave up the first place in favor of the French luxury magnate Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon Musk has lost $140 billion since January, while still maintaining a tidy $130 billion net worth.
The evaporation of more than half of his wealth is mainly due to Tesla’s collapse on Wall Street (-69% on December 28, 2022).
Shares in the electric carmaker, previously pampered by investors, continue to slide after Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter in late October.
From the layoff of more than half of Twitter’s workforce to Donald Trump’s return to the social network, the stormy entrepreneur’s first months at the helm of the platform have been marked by plenty of controversy.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, redoubled his efforts to promote this virtual world, presented by its promoters as the future of the Internet.
Investors are far from convinced at the moment, as evidenced by the collapse of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which has fallen 65.5% since the beginning of the year.
Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth decreased from $81 billion to $44.4 billion.
Meta, which is heavily dependent on advertising revenue, has also suffered in this sector amid global inflation and increased competition.
Jeff Bezos
After stepping down as CEO of Amazon in July 2021, Jeff Bezos has devoted most of his time to space exploration through his company Blue Origin.
However, his fortune remains heavily tied to the e-commerce giant’s stock value, which has fallen more than 51% in 2022.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has lost more than $86 billion this year. His wealth is estimated at 106 billion dollars.
The 58-year-old entrepreneur, owner of the American newspaper “The Washington Post”, told CNN in November that he intends to donate most of his wealth to charity during his lifetime.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Two of Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are no longer at the company’s helm, as they stepped down in 2019 from parent company Alphabet, which owns YouTube or the messaging service.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin remain on the board of Alphabet, where they are the largest individual shareholders.
The two men’s fortunes have been hit by a 40.5% drop in Alphabet’s shares since January, which has suffered from declining advertising revenue and faces competition from the likes of TikTok in the entertainment segment.
Larry Page’s decreased by $46.1 billion, and Sergey Brin’s decreased by $44.8 billion.
They are the 10th and 11th richest people on the planet with $82.3 and $78.8 billion respectively.
Zhang Yiming
Chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming is an exception to this technological failure.
The owner of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is worth $10.4 billion to $55 billion in 2022, making him the 23rd richest person in the world.
But TikTok is the focus of US authorities, who are concerned about possible ties between the popular video-sharing app and Beijing.
The Biden administration has approved banning TikTok from the phones of federal employees and may force ByteDance to sell the US version of the app.
