The Russia-Ukraine crisis, Covid-19 and volatile stock markets caused wealth erosion and led to 329 billionaires dropping out of the Forbes’ 2022 rich list
The combined net worth of the world’s richest people slipped 3 per cent to $12.7 trillion over the past year, from a record $13.1tn in 2021, driven by the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Covid-19 pandemic and volatile stock markets, with Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of Tesla topping the Forbes’ 2022 World Billionaires List.
There are 2,668 billionaires in the world, down from an all-time high of 2,755 last year, it said in the annual report, which used stock prices and exchange rates from March 11 to calculate the net worth of the world’s richest people.
“In all, 329 people fell off the billionaires list this year — the most since the 2009 financial crisis,” Forbes said on Tuesday.
Mr Musk, who was recently appointed to Twitter’s board after emerging as the biggest single shareholder in the microblogging platform on Monday, topped the Forbes list for the first time with a net worth of $219 billion.
The billionaire, who owns more than 73.4 million shares in the social media platform valued at about $3bn, will “serve as a Class II director with a term expiring at the company’s 2024 annual meeting of stockholders”, Twitter said in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Tuesday.
In contrast to the Forbes’ list, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index named Mr Musk the world’s richest person at the end of 2021 with a personal fortune of $273.5bn.
Mr Musk added $68bn to his net worth over the past year after a 33 per cent jump in the share price of his electric vehicle maker, Tesla, Forbes said.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos fell to number two for the first time in four years “due to a 3 per cent drop in Amazon stock and increased charitable giving, which wiped $6bn from his net worth”, it said.
Comments