Elon Musk has officially broken the world record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history according to the Guinness World Records.
Musk kicked off the year by becoming the first person in history to lose approximately $2 billion.
The previous record for the largest loss of personal wealth was held by Japanese tech investor Masayoshi Son who lost $58.6 billion in 2000.
According to Forbes, Musk’s net worth dropped from a peak of $320 billion in 2021 to $138 billion as of January 2023, largely due to the poor performance of his electric car company, Tesla’s stock.
‘Long-term fundamentals are extremely strong. Short-term market madness is unpredictable,’ Musk tweeted after the market closed for the year on 30 December 2022.
Towards the end of 2022 he lost his title of the world’s richest person to fashion titan Bernard Arnault, according to Forbes’ real-time wealth tracker.
Before you start feeling too sorry for him, the Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter boss is still worth around $140 billion.
Things seemed to take a turn for the worse this year after he bought Twitter for $44 billion (£34.5 billion).
Just this year, Musk sold nearly $40 billion worth of Tesla shares, leaving investors unhappy.
Many Tesla investors are worried that his preoccupation with Twitter has interrupted his focus on managing the EV company.
Musk made his debut on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2012 with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.
Currently, SpaceX is his most valuable company in which he has a $44.8 billion stake.
Meanwhile, Tesla is offering American buyers a $7,500 discount on some of its models, and the company is reportedly reducing production at its Shanghai facility.
The billionaire maintains that Tesla is ‘executing better than ever’ and blames the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates.
Besides Tesla and Twitter, where Musk’s management and tweets are attracting political attention and blowback, he also heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup developing interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.
In November, Musk hinted at the possibility of Twitter going bankrupt.
Musk is not the only tech billionaire whose fortune is shrinking. Tech moguls lost a combined £344 billion in 2022.
Bezos lost $84 billion (£70 billion) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who is pushing ahead with his plans to forge the ‘metaverse’ lost $81 billion (£67 billion).
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