Elon Musk, Twitter and Tesla CEO, briefly lost his title as the world’s richest person today, according to the Forbes list that tracks the wealth of the world’s billionaires in real-time. The steep drop in Mr Musk’s net worth was due to Tesla shares going down and a $44 billion bet on Twitter.
Mr Musk, 51, was replaced as the world’s richest person by Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury brand Louis Vuitton’s parent company LVMH.
Mr Arnault took the top spot in the Forbes list with a net worth of $185.3 billion. Musk, who has regained his No. 1 spot, has a personal wealth of $185.7 billion.
Elon Musk has held the title of the world’s richest person since September 2021, when he dislodged Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on the rich list.
In 2022, Mr Musk’s net worth has already gone down by over $200 billion as shares of Tesla dropped to their lowest level in two years.
The electric-car maker comprises the bulk of his fortune and is struggling with burgeoning Covid-related restrictions in China, its largest market outside of the US.
Mr Musk has also been preoccupied with Twitter, the social media network he acquired last month for $44 billion. The company has lost about 60% of its workforce since Musk took over. Investors have been questioning whether the billionaire is spreading himself too thin among his various high-profile ventures.
Besides Tesla and Twitter, Mr 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.
