The five richest men in the world, who count the millions in their bank accounts by the thousands, did not start 2022 in the best way. In fact, the first weeks came with a collective loss of some 85,000 million dollars of their wealth .
The losses caused the fortune of one of the most important personalities in the technological universe, Elon Musk, to drop to about 243,000 million dollars, about 27,000 million less than at the beginning of the year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
It was also nearly $100 billion lower than in November, when the Tesla and Space X owner’s net worth peaked at $335 billion.
On the other hand, Musk stated that he will pay more taxes than any other American in the history of his country.
As he explained on social networks, the CEO of Tesla acknowledged that his tax account will exceed 11,000 million dollars in 2021.
Jeff Bezos, the world exponent of electronic commerce. Photo: AFP.
The second richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, founder of the e-commerce giant Amazon, saw his bank account in the red by about $25 billion in the first weeks of this year.
Jeff Bezos is the majority shareholder in the Amazon.com site, The Washington Post newspaper and the Blue Origin aerospace company that in December made the first of the private trips in the capsule of the New Shepard rocket.
At the same time, legendary Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has also seen his wealth drop by $9.5 billion since January 1, according to the Bloomberg index.
For its part, the estate of the co-founder of Google, Larry Page, registered losses of about 12,000 million dollars.
Another member of this select group is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta-Facebook, whose net worth has decreased by about $12 billion since the beginning of this year.
According to Bloomberg, the only one of the five richest people in the world who did not lose money last week was Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of French luxury giant LVMH.
Still, Arnault’s net worth has fallen by about $10.5 billion this year, and LVMH shares are down 5% amid the broader market slump.
Binance CEO among the richest in the world
The rise of cryptocurrencies made Chinese-Canadian Changpeng Zhao the most prominent personality on the world scene and one of the new billionaires with a net worth of $96 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Zhao, 44, thus overtook Asia’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, and is rivaled by tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Zhao’s fortune could be significantly higher, as his wealth estimate does not take into account his personal crypto assets, which include Bitcoin and his own company’s token. Binance Coin, now called BNB, is up roughly 1,300% in the past year.
Binance generated at least $20 billion in revenue during 2021, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. This represented almost triple what Wall Street analysts expect Coinbase Global Inc., a publicly traded company with a market value of $50 billion, to raise by 2021.
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