2022 might not be the greatest year for Elon Musk, with the billionaire losing more than $200 billion of his fortune.
Musk became the second person ever to amass a personal fortune of more than $200 billion in 2021, a few months after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
In 2022, Musk overthrew Bezos who held the title of the world’s richest man for four years straight.
At the end of last year, Musk lost his title of the world’s richest person to fashion titan Bernard Arnault, according to Forbes’ real-time wealth tracker.
Musk who is the head of electric car company, Tesla and rocket company, SpaceX, had his fortune peak at $340 billion in November 2021.
This year, the billionaire became the owner of Twitter while his fortune took a hit, plummeting to $137 billion (£165 billion), after the value of his stake in Tesla tumbled.
Just this year, Musk sold nearly $40 billion worth of Tesla shares, leaving investors unhappy.
Musk made his debut on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2012 with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.
Currently, SpaceX is his most valuable company in which he has a $44.8 billion stake.
Meanwhile, Tesla is offering American buyers a $7,500 discount on some of its models, and the company is reportedly reducing production at its Shanghai facility.
The billionaire maintains that Tesla is ‘executing better than ever’ and blames the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates.
Besides Tesla and Twitter, where Musk’s management and tweets are attracting political attention and blowback, he also heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup developing interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.
In November, Musk hinted at the possibility of Twitter going bankrupt.
Musk is not the only tech billionaire whose fortune is shrinking. Tech moguls lost a combined £344 billion in 2022.
Bezos lost $84 billion (£70 billion) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who is pushing ahead with his plans to forge the ‘metaverse’ lost $81 billion (£67 billion).
While Zuckerberg used to rank consistently in the top 10 wealthiest people on the planet, he’s now down at around number 25.
