In 2022, the shares of American tech giants literally plummeted on the stock market. As a result, the world’s biggest fortunes, from Elon Musk to TikTok owner Zhang Yiming, have lost tens of billions of dollars. Overview of the losses suffered by the richest men on the planet.
Elon Musk
The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and more recently Twitter has long topped the list of the richest people on Earth. In 2022, he lost this place, dethroned by the French luxury magnate Bernard Arnault, boss of LVMH. According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk has lost $140 billion since January, still keeping the tidy sum of $130 billion.
The evaporation of more than half of his fortune is mainly due to the fall of Tesla on the stock market. Previously pampered by investors, the action of the manufacturer of electric vehicles has continued to plunge since the takeover of Twitter by the billionaire at the end of October, and the many controversial decisions that followed.
mark zuckerberg
The founder of Facebook has redoubled his efforts this year to promote the metaverse, this virtual world presented as the future of the Internet. Investors, however, are far from convinced: the action of Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has lost 65.5% of its value since January. Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune has thus shrunk from 81 billion dollars to fall to 44.4 billion.
Jeff Bezos
Since his departure from the general management of Amazon in July 2021, the billionaire has devoted the majority of his time to space exploration with 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.
Jeff Bezos is still the executive director of Amazon’s board of directors and has lost more than $86 billion this year. His fortune is estimated at $106 billion. The 58-year-old entrepreneur told CNN last 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, have not been at the helm of the company since 2019. They remain, however, members of the board of directors of Alphabet, the parent company which also owns YouTube and Gmail. The drop of 40; 5% of the company’s share since January has strongly impacted the fortunes of the two men.
Larry Page thus lost 46.1 billion dollars and has “only” 82.3 billion dollars left. Sergey Brin for his part lost 44.8 billion dollars and keeps a fortune of 78.8 billion dollars. They remain the 10th and 11th richest people on the planet.
Zhang Yiming
The Chinese billionaire is an exception in this technological debacle. The owner of ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, saw his fortune increase by 10.4 billion dollars in 2022 to reach 55 billion this year, making the Chinese the 23rd richest person in the world.
But TikTok is in the crosshairs of the American authorities, who are worried about possible links between the social network and the Chinese government. Joe Biden’s administration has approved banning TikTok from federal employee phones and could force ByteDance to sell the US version of the app.