Jeff Bezos lost $15billion from his wealth in a single day after a massive stock slump saw the world’s 500 richest people including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk lost $134billion overall.
Shares of Amazon.com Inc went down by 8.8 per cent on Friday as part of a wider sell-off in the market, according to Bloomberg. This dropped Bezos’ net worth to $191.5billion, because his wealth being wrapped up in his company.
Bezos has been repeatedly offloading Amazon shares this year, selling $8.5billion in stocks in February and announcing plans to sell another $5billion worth of shares, which would still leave him with 912 million shares, or 8.8 per cent of the stock.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index fell by 2.4 per cent, which also impacted billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk included in the list of the world’s 500 richest people.
Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc shares fell by 1.9 per cent, causing him to lose more than $3billion in value, while Musk’s net worth of $252billion also dropped by $6.6billion as his Tesla shares plunged by 4.2 per cent.
Friday’s $15.2billion loss is the third-worst wipeout Bezos has experienced after his wealth shrank by $36billion after his divorce in April 2019 and when Amazon’s shares fell by 14 per cent in April 2022.
The recent plunge of the Amazon shares comes after the company said that it would continue to invest heavily into AI, despite fears by investors all over the industry that the gains fueled by AI this year are overdone.
Other billionaire who lost money due to the Nasdaq falling are Oracle Corp’s Larry Ellison, whose wealth dropped by $4.4billion, as well as tech billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page who each lost more than $3billion.
The aftermath of the Nasdaq index falling on Friday was still felt on Monday as stock markets around the globe continued plunging amid fears the US economy may be on track for a recession as Japan suffered its worst sell-off since ‘Black Monday’ in 1987.
Experts at investment bank Goldman Sachs said they now believed there was a staggering 25 per cent chance of a recession in the US – up ten percent from their previous estimate of 15 per cent, while JP Morgan put the chances of a recession at 50 per cent.
US stock index futures tumbled on Monday, with those tied to the Nasdaq falling nearly 4 per cent, but traders are now ramping up bets that the Federal Reserve will announce an emergency interest rate cut in response to the global stock market crash and to avoid a huge recession.
