The year under the sign of fiasco: 2022 turned out to be a financial failure for technobillionaires

Here are the main victims of 2023, according to AFP.

Elon Musk

In 2021, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk became the richest man in the world.

In 2022, Musk lost more than half of his fortune, losing the first place in the ranking of the richest to French tycoon Bernard Arnault. According to the Bloomberg index, due to the collapse of the Tesla stock price this year, Musk lost $ 140 billion, and now his total capital is estimated at $ 130 billion. According to experts, the future of the company for the production of electric vehicles is now in question. Seeking a buyout of Twitter, which cost him $ 44 billion, Musk sold off his Tesla shares, which caused their price to fall even further.

Mark Zuckerberg

The efforts of the founder of Facebook* this year were focused on the promotion of the so-called metaverse, but investors have been convinced by Zuckerberg's assurances about the benefits of virtual reality so far.

The advertising market that shrank amid the global economic downturn and the success of its main competitor, the TikTok* application, also contributed to the fact that Meta* stock prices collapsed in 2022, and Zuckerberg's fortune decreased by $ 81 billion, now he has 44.4 billion.

Jeff Bezos

Despite the fact that in mid-2021 Bezos left the post of CEO of Amazon, switching to the development of his space company Blue Origin, his fortune still depends on the results of online retail, and Amazon shares in the outgoing year fell in price by more than 49%.

As a result, Bezos lost more than $ 86 billion, now his fortune is estimated at 106 billion.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Since 2019, the founders of Google have ceased to lead the company, but they remain members of the board of directors of the parent company Alphabet, which also deals with projects in the field of healthcare and artificial intelligence.

Amid competition and declining advertising revenue, Alphabet's stock prices have fallen by 39% over the year. According to Bloomberg, Page and Brin now occupy the 10th and 11th lines in the list of the richest people on the planet, but their fortunes have decreased to $ 46.1 billion and $ 44.8 billion, respectively.

Zhang Yiming

The founder of TikTok* was a happy exception: in 2022, his fortune grew by $ 10.4 billion.

Now the owner of Bytedance* with a fortune of 55 billion is the second richest person in China and the 23rd in the world. However, the future of TikTok does not look cloudless. So, in the United States, there is great pressure forcing the authorities to close access to the application, since its popularity strengthens China's position. US federal officials have already banned TikTok on government phones and are rumored to be thinking about forcing Bytedance to sell the US version of the app.

* The company is recognized as an extremist organization, its activities in Russia are prohibited.