Tesla, which lost 12% in one day, Apple, whose market capitalization fell below 2,000 billion dollars (1,895 billion euros) when it was worth more than 3,000 billion dollars a year ago , and Wall Street which ends, Tuesday January 3, its first day of 2023 in the red. Those who hoped for a respite at the start of the year are at their expense, after theannus horribilis of 2022.
In 2022, the American stock market experienced its worst performance since the great financial crisis of 2008: the Nasdaq index, rich in technology stocks, lost a third of its value, the S&P 500, which represents large companies, fell by a fifth.
The performance of the Dow Jones, calculated in a very complex way, with a decline limited to 9.5%, is misleading: it was the general bérézina, with the exception of oil stocks, boosted by the crisis in Ukraine. According to the Bloomberg agency, in 2022, all of the world’s stock markets lost 25 trillion dollars, but it is by far the collapse of the tech giants that dominates.
In detail, the famous “Gafam” – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft -, which have imposed themselves since the bursting of the Internet bubble at the turn of the century, look gray: Google, the digital advertising giant , is down more than 40% and is worth only 1,150 billion dollars; Apple melted $1 trillion; Amazon, the distribution firm founded by Jeff Bezos, saw its share price halve and lost $875 billion; Microsoft, the giant created by Bill Gates, fell 30% – after being worth more than 2.5 trillion dollars, it fell back below the 1.8 trillion mark.
Elon Musk dethroned by Frenchman Bernard Arnault
In this battle, Meta (ex-Facebook), the company of Mark Zuckerberg, is a dwarf, with a value falling from more than 900 billion dollars to around 320 billion. Finally, Tesla, the car firm developed by Elon Musk, is now worth just $340 billion, after hitting a high of $1.25 trillion. By way of comparison, the forty French companies in the CAC 40 are worth 2,300 billion dollars.
In this context, the billionaires, who had seen the value of their companies soar during the Covid-19 crisis due to an ultra-accommodating monetary policy, have less fabulous fortunes.
Elon Musk, once the richest man in the world, is now the man who has lost the most money in the history of the planet: he has seen his fortune reduced by more than 200 billion dollars compared to at the highest reached in the fall of 2021 and now weighs “only” 128 billion dollars, according to the Bloomberg agency. Mr. Musk is now dethroned by the French Bernard Arnault, boss of the luxury empire LVMH, the richest man in the world with 164 billion dollars of fortune estimated by Bloomberg.
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