For most of the world’s super-rich, 2022 is a year that brings back painful memories. After experiencing a rapid expansion of wealth during the epidemic, 2022 saw a sudden and dramatic decline in their assets. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the wealth of the world’s 500 richest people evaporated by nearly $1.4 trillion in 2022.
Many of the problems are self-inflicted: Sam Bankman-Fried, the former “cryptocurrency prodigy,” is suspected of fraud, and Elon Musk, the new boss of Twitter, has seen his assets shrink by $138 billion from early January due to his own antics. 138 billion dollars.
Meanwhile, the wealth of the world’s rich is declining across the board amid widespread inflation and tighter central bank monetary policy. Loose monetary policy during the epidemic has seen their wealth rise to unprecedented heights, but in most cases, the bigger the rise, the bigger the fall. The net worths of Musk, Jeff Bezos, Changpeng Zhao and Mark Zuckerberg have collectively evaporated by about $392 billion this year.
Take Musk, for example. on Jan. 27, Musk lost $25.8 billion in a single day. At the time, Tesla issued a warning about supply chain challenges, and Musk was the world’s richest man at the time. It was the fourth-largest one-day drop in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and it foreshadowed a rocky year ahead for Musk.
Shortly after disclosing his 9.1 percent stake in Twitter, Musk offered on April 14 to buy the company for $44 billion. Even for him, that’s a high price. To get enough money for the deal, he initially planned to borrow billions of dollars, leverage it with Tesla stock and pay $21 billion in cash. But analysts noted that this would require Musk to sell a lot of Tesla stock. In the months that followed, however, as the market deteriorated, Musk tried to engineer an “escape route” and opened a months-long legal battle with Twitter. By the time the deal closed in October, Musk’s net worth was $39 billion less than when he first proposed the acquisition.
Zuckerberg’s wealth loss was also significant. As of mid-September, Zuckerberg’s net worth had shrunk by $71 billion, or 57 percent, since the beginning of January, largely due to, among other things, Meta’s costly transition to a meta-universe and the slide in the tech industry as a whole that dragged down Meta’s stock price. 2022 saw Zuckerberg drop 19 spots to No. 25 in the Bloomberg Wealth Index, the lowest ranking since 2014.
However, it wasn’t all bad news for the billionaire class this year. India’s Gautam Adani surpassed Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in the rankings. Some of the world’s richest families, such as the Kochs and the Marrs, are also growing in wealth. And even among U.S. tech giants, such losses as those suffered by Zuckerberg are not uncommon.
The bubble of the epidemic economy is rapidly bursting, and so is the wealth created by the epidemic. During the epidemic, industries such as vaccines (Modena’s Stephen Bansell), used cars (Carvana’s Ernie Garcia II and Ernie Garcia III), e-commerce (Coupang’s Kim Bo Seok), and the rapid rise of Zoom have created huge fortunes for founder Yuan Zheng. The 58 billionaires in such industries that benefited from the epidemic, whose wealth grew at a very fast pace, saw their asset size shrink by an average of 58% from its peak, a much larger drop than the rest of the billionaires in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
