How fast the fortunes of the world's richest shift: just two weeks ago, when AMZN hit its all time high on July 27, its CEO Jeff Bezos briefly surpassed Bill Gates as the world's richest man for the first time ever, despite growing rumors and rumblings of regulatory pushback against Amazon which is rapidly emerging as the biggest monopoly threat to established legacy industries.
Fast forward two weeks and Bezos is no longer the world's richest man, he isn't even the world's second richest man because after yesterday's market slump and Nasdaq plunge that drained $42.7 billion from the net worth of the world’s 500 richest people, the drop in Amazon stock...
.... was enough to push Bezos from his spot as the world’s second-richest person according to Bloomberg calculations. The worst market rout since May, lopped $2 billion from Bezos’s fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after AMZN dropped 2.6% to under $957, more than $100 lower than its July 27 all time high of just over $1.080.
As a result, Bezos is now worth "only" $82.2 billion about $600 million behind Spanish retail magnate Amancio Ortega, founder of the Zara clothing chain.
The losses, which came following the escalating jawboning and war of words between President Trump North Korea, spanned multiple regions and industries, but tech billionaires were hit the hardest, accounting for seven of the 10 biggest declines. NetEase Chairman Lei Ding incurred the second-largest loss, dropping $1.8 billion to $16.8 billion, followed by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth slid $1.6 billion to $71.2 billion, rounding off the list of the Top 5 richest people in the world.
Meanwhile, the top spot once again belongs to Bill Gates, who briefly ceded the No. 1 spot to Bezos on an intraday basis two weeks ago; Gates lost $848.5 million on Thursday which however was not nearly enough to dethrone him from the rank of world's richest, with a net worth of $90 billion.