Elon Musk briefly lost his title as the world’s richest person, according to Forbes, following a steep drop in the value of his stake in the electric-car maker Tesla and the $44 billion purchase of social media platform Twitter.
Bernard Arnault, chief executive of luxury brand Louis Vuitton’s parent company LVMH and his family briefly took the title as the world’s richest, but were back at No. 2 with a personal wealth of $185.3 billion.
Musk, who has held the top spot on the Forbes list since September 2021, has a net worth of $185.7 billion. Musk originally took the title from Amazon, founder Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos’s fortune was decimated by his divorce, plus $680 million worth of Amazon shares in donations.
Tesla has lost nearly half its market value and Musk’s net worth has dropped by about $70 billion since he bid for Twitter in April. Musk closed the deal for Twitter in October with $13 billion in loans and a $33.5 billion equity commitment.
Besides Tesla, Musk also heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.
