The world’s 500 richest people lost $134 billion of their wealth overnight, thanks to a bloodbath in stock prices on Friday, led by Amazon.
The Nasdaq The 100 Index fell 2.4 percent on Friday, wiping at least $1 billion off the net worth of all 10 richest people in the world – at least on paper. The index has fallen more than 10 percent since its recent peak.
Tech billionaires alone – many of the richest people in the world – lost $68 billion of their combined wealth, according to Bloomberg’s Calculations. Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page each said goodbye to more than $3 billion on Friday.
Elon Musk’s net worth has dropped from $252 billion on July 31 to $235 billion on August 2, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
During this time, Oracle’s Larry Ellison’s net worth grew by $3 billion overnight on paper, before losing all of his profits and another $3 billion the next day.
While Amazon shares fell nearly 9% in one day on August 2, its founder Jeff Bezos saw nearly $16 billion robbed of his wealth.
This is the third biggest loss for Bezos, after he already lost $36 billion following his divorce settlement in April 2019. His net worth is now around 191 billion dollars.
The world’s second-richest person has also been steadily dumping Amazon shares this year. The 60-year-old sold around $8.5 billion worth of shares over nine trading days in February before recently announcing his plan to sell another 25 million shares valued at $5 billion.
Why did US technology stocks crash?
In short: uncertainty about AI, Federal Reserve interest rate cuts and a potential recessionas well as some spectacular disappointments in earnings figures have contributed to the technology-heavy index entering a correction zone.
The downturn began when Amazon a conference call on the results That gain will take a back seat as the company plans to invest heavily in AI. This raised investor concerns that AI gains could be overvalued and led to the biggest drop in Amazon shares since April 2022, when they plunged 14%.
At the same time, Microsoft Posted slowed growth in its cloud computing unit Azure and said it expected continued high spending on data centers. Meanwhile, Tesla lost Earnings estimates for the second quarter and Alphabet’s Youtube Advertising revenues fell short of expectations.
In addition, a report from the U.S. Department of Labor said the U.S. economy created about 61,000 fewer jobs than expected last month.
And with unemployment at 4.3% – the highest since October 2021 – concerns about a looming recession are growing.