According to Forbes, American billionaires collectively lost $660 billion, the most of any country. In 2022, the world's billionaires collectively lost roughly $2 trillion.
Forbes' real-time tracker also shows a decrease in the number of billionaires from 2,671 to 2,523.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and the freshly minted Twitter, saw his fortune shrink the greatest among America's billionaires. According to Forbes, Musk's net worth fell by around $115 billion this year.
As of Dec. 27, Tesla's stock price was down roughly 70% year to date. Long-term Tesla investors are urging the firm's board of directors to refocus Musk on the electric vehicle industry.
Musk sold around $23 billion in Tesla shares to pay for the $44 billion purchase of Twitter he made in October. Since then, he has admitted that this purchase involved an "obvious" overpayment.
More recently, he announced that once he finds a suitable successor, he will stand down from his position as CEO of the social networking site.
With a net worth of about $139 billion as of Dec. 27, according to Forbes, Musk is still the richest person in the U.S., despite losing the title of richest person in the world this year.
And while the publication calls Musk "the biggest loser of 2022," he's not the only billionaire whose wealth has decreased.
Mark Zuckerberg. co-founder of Meta Platforms, lost $78 billion this year. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is down by $80 billion. Nike's Phil Knight lost $18.3 billion; Google co-founder Larry Page took a $40 billion hit and Leonard Lauder of The Estée Lauder Companies lost $9.8 billion.
Some high-profile businessmen slipped totally off the billionaire list in 2022. Rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, dropped out after Adidas terminated ties with him on Oct. 25 due to his continuous anti-Semitic rants, for example.
Sam Bankman-Fried went from cover star of Fortune magazine to probable felon. The founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency trading platform FTX, who is now facing fraud charges, saw his net worth plunge by billions after the company declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11.
The roughly 300 tech billionaires throughout the world, who collectively lost more than $1 trillion in 2022, have been hit the hardest. Things have returned to normal after a turbulent two years during which the pandemic boom and overzealous investors drove up the prices of IT stocks and startups. Companies are cutting expenses, firing employees, and canceling IPOs.
