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Elon Musk: According to Forbes, he still has a net worth of $185.7 billion
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ANGELA WEISS / AFP
Upheaval on Twitter, falling demand for Tesla models in China - and now this too: The e-car pioneer and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk briefly had to vacate first place in the "Forbes" list of the super-rich.
The background is that the remaining shares in Tesla had lost a lot of value in the meantime.
He had previously sold numerous shares in the automaker to finance the $44 billion purchase of the social network Twitter.
Tens of billions lost from Twitter deal
Instead of Musk, Bernard Arnault, head of the parent company of the luxury brand Louis Vuitton (LVMH), and his family briefly climbed to first place on the list on Wednesday.
They are now back in second place with personal wealth of $185.3 billion.
Arnault's LVMH group owns more than 70 luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon and Bulgari.
Most recently, the Frenchman made headlines with the takeover of the Tiffany jewelry chain.
Musk, who has been at the top of the Forbes list since September 2021, has a net worth of $185.7 billion, according to Forbes.
He took over the title from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Overall, however, 2022 wasn't a good year for Musk's fortune.
Tesla shares have fallen more than 47 percent since Musk's plans to buy Twitter were announced earlier this year.
In the course of Wednesday they gave up 2.7 percent in view of the weakening business in China, which Tesla apparently wants to counter with price reductions.
Tesla has lost almost half of its market value and Musk's net worth is down about $70 billion since the entrepreneur made a bid for Twitter in April.
Musk stuck with it anyway -- securing the network in October with $13 billion in loans and a $33.5 billion equity commitment.
Besides Tesla, Musk also runs the rocket company SpaceX -- and Neuralink, a startup developing ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.
Apr/Reuters
