Musk’s net worth declines by $29bn as Twitter deal fears weigh on Tesla shares
It has been a week of highs and lows for Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk, whose net worth declined by 10.83 per cent – or $29 billion – to $239.2bn overnight after the electric car maker’s shares fell by 12 per cent in New York trading.
The stock rout wiped off about $126bn from the company’s value, according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.
Tesla investors are concerned he may have to sell shares in the car maker to complete his $44bn takeover of Twitter, which was approved by the social media company’s board of directors this week, Bloomberg reported yesterday.
Mr Musk, 50, the world’s richest person, had a net worth of $268.2bn on Tuesday, Forbes’ data showed.
However, this is not the first time his net worth has taken a beating. On November 14, he lost a record $50bn after Tesla shares fell for two days in a row.
“It is the biggest two-day decline in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the highest one-day fall after [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos’s $36bn decline after his divorce from MacKenzie Scott in 2019,” Bloomberg reported at the time.
Two weeks earlier, on October 28, 2021, Mr Musk, who is also founder and chief executive of rocket company SpaceX, became the first person on the planet to be worth more than $300bn after his a personal fortune grew to $302bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The drop in Mr Musk’s current net worth narrows his lead over Mr Bezos – the world’s second-richest person – to $74bn. Mr Bezos’s fortune stands at $165.2bn.
The Canadian-American businessman, who was born in South Africa and has seven children, owns about 17 per cent of Tesla, a February 2021 regulatory filing showed.
His stake in privately held SpaceX is valued at about $40.3bn, figures compiled by Bloomberg show.
Mr Musk made his first millions in the 1990s when he sold his first company, Zip2, for more than $300 million.
He then formed X.com, an online payment system that eventually became PayPal, which he sold to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock price decline comes amid a broader sell-off in equity markets around the world due to slower economic expansion and persistent inflation, according to Bloomberg.
This means Mr Musk was not the only billionaire to
Tesla shareholders are concerned Musk may have to sell shares in the car maker to complete his takeover of Twitter
lose a sizeable slice of his personal fortune overnight, with the net worth of eight of the world’s top 10 richest billionaires also falling by a combined $51.7bn, according to Forbes’ data.
However, there were two wealth-gainers on the top 10 billionaires list.
Self-made billionaire and Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani, now the world’s fifth-richest person, added $4.7bn, or 3.86 per cent, to his net worth of $126.6bn while Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani climbed two places on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List to become the seventh-richest person on the planet with a net worth of $105.6bn, up $4bn, or 3.94 per cent.