Amid a legal dispute to cancel Twitter’s $44 billion purchase, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk topped the list of the 400 richest people in the United States for the first time. The ranking was prepared by Forbes magazine.
With a net worth of $251 billion, Musk is $60.5 billion richer than a year ago, thanks to an 11% increase in the electric vehicle maker’s share price and a new $127 billion funding round to the rocket manufacturer. The entrepreneur owns $100 billion more than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose fortune has fallen by $50 billion, the second-largest drop on the list this year.
The announcement comes after a year when the 400 richest people in the US were hit by rising inflation. The group is $500 billion poorer than a year ago and has a total net worth of $4 trillion, down 11% from 2021.
The minimum net worth required to make the list also fell by $200 million to $2.7 billion.
According to the news in the North American publication, “For the first time since the Great Recession, America’s ultra-rich are no richer than the previous year. Forbes calculated net worth using stock prices as of September 2, 2022.”
No other group has been more hit than the big tech giants in the US, which lost a combined $315 billion as share prices fell and venture capital flows slowed.
musk fall
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who came in third last year, fell out of the top 10 for the first time since 2014. It’s $76.8 billion poorer than a year ago, the biggest loss on the 2022 list, according to Forbes.
“Zuckerberg’s entry into the ‘metaverse’ was not well received and prompted him to promise ‘major updates’ to the charts following online criticism. Zuck’s fortune and knockout him out of the top 10 for the first time since 2014,” Forbes said.
The result is in line with the Bloomberg index, which last week said the Facebook CEO dropped 14 places on the world’s richest list.
Meta stocks fell nearly 23% in February after unexpected spending in their “metaverse” amid heightened competition with TikTok led to lower fourth-quarter profits and a lower-than-expected revenue outlook.
In July, Meta reported its first quarterly revenue decline from the previous year, after reporting the first drop in daily Facebook users.
Who are the 10 richest people in the USA?
- Elon Musk (Tesla): 251.0
- Jeff Bezos (Amazon): 151.0
- Bill Gates (Microsoft): 106.0
- Larry Ellison (Oracle): 101.0
- Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway): 97.0
- Larry Page (Google): 93.0
- Sergey Brin (Google): 89.0
- Steve Ballmer (Microsoft): 83.0
- Michael Bloomberg: 76.8
- Jim Walton (Walmart): 57.9
source: Noticias
