If you spend any time at all on the internet, you already know that Elon Musk had a very eventful 2022. Not only did he buy Twitter for an extremely-inflated $44 billion, he also saw the value of Tesla – the primary source of his wealth and liquidity, plummet. As a result, Elon Musk lost more money than any other billion in 2022.
The 5 biggest billionaire wealth losers in 2022 were:
#1: Elon Musk – $140 billion loss. Elon fell from $280 billion on January 1st, to $140 billion on December 31st. As we detail a bit later in this article, his net worth was actually closer to $340 billion if you go back to November 2021.
#2: Jeff Bezos – $88 billion loss. Jeff fell from $193 to $105 billion by the end of 2022.
#3: Changpeng Zhao – $84 billion loss. CZ, the founder of crypto exchange Binance, saw his fortune fall from $96 billion to $12 billion.
#4: Mark Zuckerberg – $82 billion loss. Mark's fortune plummeted from $128 billion to $44 billion as the value of Facebook's stock price was decimated.
#5: Tie: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin both saw roughly $46 billion shaved from their respective fortunes in 2022. Larry started the year with a net worth of $127 billion and ended with $81 billion. Sergey started with $124 billion and ended with $77 billion
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As we stated a moment ago, the bulk of Elon Musk's fortune is tied Tesla stock, which saw some precipitous drops through 2022. At the end of the year, the company's price per share was down about 70 percent compared to where it was at the start of 2022.
Thanks mostly to that drop in Tesla's share price, Elon Musk's net worth was dragged down from its staggering peak of $340 billion in November of 2021 to $140 billion to close out 2022.
That $200 billion loss of wealth is enough to qualify Musk's as the biggest billionaire loser of the year, but it's also much more than that – probably the most money anyone in modern history has ever lost.
Musk was once the richest person in the world by a very large margin, but at the close of 2022 he had fallen into second place behind luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault, who managed to rise to number one for the first time in his life.
As I write this, Tesla's stock market slide is still ongoing, so it isn't clear whether Musk will be able to bounce back and have a better 2023 than his 2022. And even though it's impossible to state decisively that Tesla's poor stock performance is a direct result of Musk's antics as Twitter CEO, that appears to be a clear consensus. Economist Paul Krugman recently penned a New York Times op-ed stating that the brand Musk has been cultivating for himself on Twitter is in direct opposition to his bread and butter at Tesla:
"[Tesla] is a brand whose customer base largely consists of wealthy cultural liberals who were attracted in part by Elon Musk's perceived with-it persona. Given all that, Musk's public embrace of MAGA conspiracy theories is an almost inconceivably bad marketing move, practically designed to alienate his main buyers."
If the Tesla ship isn't righted soon, Musk could see his fortune, and his place in the chain of billionaire wealth, continue to drop. But no matter what happens next, he'll always be the billionaire who lost the most wealth in 2022 – to say the least!
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