The stock market tumble of the shares of the American tech giants has cost tens of billions of dollars in 2022 to the biggest fortunes on the planet.
Here is the list of billionaires who have lost the most dollars this year:
Elon Musk
Long at the top of the ranking of the richest people on Earth, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, gave up the first place in favor of the French luxury magnate Bernard Arnault, boss of LVMH.
According to Bloomberg Billionaires IndexMr. Musk has lost $140 billion since January, still retaining the tidy sum of $130 billion.
The evaporation of more than half of his fortune is mainly due to the fall of Tesla on Wall Street (-69% in 2022 as of December 28).
Previously pampered by investors, the action of the manufacturer of electric vehicles has continued to plunge on the stock market since the takeover, at the end of October, of Twitter by Mr. Musk for 44 billion dollars.
From the dismissal 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 head of the platform were marred by multiple controversies.
mark zuckerberg
The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has redoubled his efforts to promote the metaverse, this virtual world presented as the future of the Internet by its promoters.
Investors are currently far from convinced, as evidenced by the collapse of the action of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which has dropped 65.5% since the beginning of the year. .
Mr. Zuckerberg’s fortune shrunk by $81 billion to $44.4 billion.
Highly dependent on advertising revenue, Meta also suffered in this sector, in a context of global inflation and increased competition.
Jeff Bezos
Since stepping down as CEO of Amazon in July 2021, Jeff Bezos has devoted much of his time to space exploration through his company Blue Origin.
His wealth, however, remains strongly tied to the e-commerce giant’s share value, which has fallen more than 51% in 2022.
Mr Bezos, who serves as executive director of Amazon’s board, has lost more than $86 billion this year. His fortune is estimated at $106 billion.
The 58-year-old entrepreneur, owner of the American daily The Washington Posttold CNN in November that he plans to donate most of his wealth to charity during his lifetime.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
The two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are no longer at the helm of the company since they abandoned their leading functions in 2019 within the parent company Alphabet, which also owns YouTube or the electronic messaging service. Gmail.
MM. Page and Brin, however, remain on Alphabet’s board of directors, of which they are the largest individual shareholders.
The 40.5% drop since January in Alphabet’s stock, which has suffered from falling advertising revenue and faces rivals like TikTok in the entertainment segment, has weighed on the fortunes of the two men.
Mr. Page’s was down $46.1 billion, and Mr. Brin’s was down $44.8 billion.
With respectively 82.3 and 78.8 billion dollars, they are however the 10e and 11e richest people on the planet.
Zhang Yiming
The Chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming is an exception in this technological debacle.
The fortune of the owner of ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, increased by 10.4 billion dollars in 2022, to reach 55 billion dollars, making him the 23e richest person in the world.
But TikTok is in the crosshairs of US authorities, who are concerned about possible links between the popular video-sharing application and Beijing.
The Biden government has approved banning TikTok from federal employee phones and may force ByteDance to sell the US version of the app.