The poorest! The stock market crash made the super-rich poorer by many billions in the first half of the year. Bloomberg calculates exactly how much Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have lost.
The previous stock market boom drove the fortunes of the super-rich to dizzying heights. Now it goes in the other direction. The crash in share prices this year has made Elon Musk and Co. many billions poorer. Together, the richest 500 people lost $1.4 trillion in the first half of 2022, according to Bloomberg news agency calculations. This was the largest six-month plunge in super-rich fortunes Bloomberg has ever recorded.
Elon Musk alone, whose wealth consists largely of Tesla shares, has lost $62 billion in the past six months. Google founder Jeff Bezos lost $63 billion after his Amazon group had previously been one of the big winners of the pandemic. And Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg even lost 65.5 billion, halving his wealth, Bloomberg calculates.
Musk, Bezos
The losses, like the previous profits, are only on paper for the time being. But they do have real effects. Musk is trying to buy Twitter for $44 billion. He doesn’t have the money for this in cash either, but has to borrow most of it from the bank. Among other things, his Tesla shares serve as security – and Tesla has lost 40 percent of its value on the stock exchange in the last six months.
Still, there is no need to feel sorry for the super-rich in view of the billions they have lost. Thorne Perkin, president of Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management, told Bloomberg that the billionaire caste has accumulated so much wealth in recent years that it can easily withstand this stock market crisis. You could even use the fallen prices to stock up cheaply for the next upswing, says the investment expert. “Many of our clients look for opportunities when there’s trouble on the streets.”
