For the vast majority of multi-billionaires, the past year was one they would rather forget.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, nearly $1.4 trillion has been wiped from the fortunes of the 500 richest people.
Only the new owner of Twitter billionaire Elon Musk lost 138 billion during the year, thus officially losing the title of the richest person in the world.
Elon Musk.
No longer the richest in the world, photo: AFP
According to Bloomberg, as of the end of the calendar year, the richest man in the world is Bernard Arnault from France, CEO of the LVMH corporation. 2022 was not an easy year for Arnault either, but his losses totaled approximately 16 billion dollars, compared to Musk's losses which are mainly explained by his unsuccessful financial adventures.
Bernard Arnault.
Took Musk's place, photo: AFP
But it's not just financial losses: the devastating war between Russia and Ukraine has triggered crippling sanctions on the businesses of Russia's largest companies.
The rampant inflation combined with the interest rate hikes by the central banks have made 2022 a particularly dramatic year for a group of billionaires whose wealth has grown to unimaginable heights in the Corona era, a period of "easy money" for technology companies.
Mark Zuckerberg, photo: AFP
The bigger the rise, the more dramatic the fall: Musk, Jeff Bezos, Changfeng Zhao, and Mark Zuckerberg alone wiped about $392 billion off their cumulative net market capitalization.
And there is no shortage of other examples.
The crashing crypto exchange FTX after a liquidity crunch wipes out 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried's fortune worth $16 billion in less than a week (his equity was valued at a record $26 billion).
There is also an exception: the Indian Gautam Adani, who not long ago purchased the port of Haifa for more than four billion shekels, managed to overtake Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the wealth index this year.
On top of that, some of the richest families in the world, such as Koch and Mers, continued to get richer.
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