As much as his ability to create wealth is unprecedented, Elon Musk’s capacity for wealth destruction is even more impressive. Since the peak of his US$340 billion (AU$505 billion) net worth in November 2021, Elon Musk has become the first person in history to lose US$200 billion (AU$297 billion) from their net worth and now claims just $137 billion (AU$203 billion) to his name according to a report from Bloomberg.
As Bloomberg states, Musk was only the second person in history to amass US$200 billion in personal wealth, crossing the twelve-figure threshold in January of 2021 only a couple of months after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos did the same. However, while the bearish global market has seen trillions of dollars of value evaporate in 2022, Musk has been hit particularly hard since his purchase of Twitter in October last year.
Less than a year ago, Musk was predicted to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2024, but with much of his net worth tied up in Tesla (TSLA) stock that plummeted 65% in 2022, that prediction is an impossibility. Critics have long voiced concern over Tesla’s position as the world’s most valuable car company (worth more than Toyota and Mercedes combined in 2022), after receiving a $1 trillion valuation towards the end of 2021, a figure that is increasingly sounding like a gross overvaluation.
In Musk’s place as the world’s richest person is Bernard Arnault from the luxury powerhouse LVMH, taking the top spot with a net worth of US$164 billion (AU$244 billion) thanks to LVMH jumping 28% for the first three quarters of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021. With many believing that Elon Musk is distracted by his new toy Twitter, short sellers made US$11.5 billion (AU$17.1 billion) on Tesla stock last year, begging the question: can Musk bounce back?
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