Clockwise from upper left, Roman Abramovich, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, Gautam Adani, Mark Zuckerberg, Changpeng Zhao.
Source: Bloomberg; Getty Images
How Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the World’s 500 Richest Billionaires Lost $1.4 Trillion in a Year
Ultra-wealthy tech founders led a wipeout in fortunes that spanned the globe, though secretive families and pro sports owners emerged relatively unscathed.
For the vast majority of the world’s wealthiest people, 2022 was a year to forget.
It’s not just the money that was lost, though it was staggering — almost $1.4 trillion was wiped from the fortunes of the richest 500 alone, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Plenty of the pain, it turns out, was self-inflicted: The alleged fraud by onetime crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried; the devastating war waged by Russia on Ukraine that spurred crippling sanctions on its business titans; and, of course, the antics of Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter who’s worth $138 billion less than he was on Jan. 1.