The planet’s wealthiest 25 people have had a rough year, with their aggregate net worth plunging by $200 billion, according to Forbes’ 2023 World Billionaires List released this week. They are still worth a combined $2.1 trillion, the rating shows.
Both the number of billionaires and their combined wealth were down, with 254 people losing their billionaire status. The remaining 2,640 billionaires lost a combined $500 billion, according to the report. Among those leaving the club were FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and rapper Kanye West.
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“Two-thirds of the top 25 are poorer than they were last year, compared to around half of the list overall,” Forbes wrote.
The ranking shows that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was the hardest-hit billionaire, seeing his fortune slide by $57 billion in a year, due to a 38% crash in the e-commerce giant’s stock price as of March 10.
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Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk was named the second-biggest loser on the list, with his net worth down $39 billion. Moreover, the billionaire has lost his title of the world’s richest person to the head of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy group (LVMH), Bernard Arnault.
According to Forbes, two other billionaires have also lost their spot among the top 25. Those are the founder of Tik Tok parent Bytedance, Zhang Yiming, who dropped one place to No. 26, and the founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao. The latter “fell from No. 19 last year all the way to No. 167 amid the crypto winter,” Forbes writes.
The ranking showed that while some of the world’s richest lost out, two billionaires joined the top 25, namely Canadian media mogul David Thomson and Nike cofounder Phil Knight.