Elon Musk has set a Guinness World Record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history. In a blog post, Forbes estimated that Mr. Musk had lost around $182 billion since November 2021, but noted that other sources put the figure closer to $200 billion. While the exact amount is unknown, Musk’s losses look to far exceed those of the previous record-holder, Japanese tech billionaire Masayoshi Son, who lost $58.6 billion in 2000.
Elon Musk’s net worth fell from $320 billion in November 2021 to $137 billion in January 2023, owing mostly to Tesla’s stock’s poor performance. According to the outlet, Mr. Musk sold $7 billion in Tesla stock to finance his deal to buy Twitter and another $4 billion in November. He sold another $3.58 billion in stock last month, pushing his total sell-off to more than $23 billion since April.
This alarming decrease in Musk’s wealth increased in October when Mr. Musk purchased Twitter for almost $44 billion. The rocky takeover, along with Musk’s controversial behavior on the platform, triggered the largest Tesla stock sell-off since the firm went public in 2010.
Meanwhile, Guinness said that in the instance of Masayoshi Son, whose net worth fell from $78 billion in February 2000 to $19.4 billion in July of the same year, the value of his company, Softbank, was wiped out by the dot-com catastrophe. The company later bought other technology companies in the United States and the United Kingdom, helping it to recover. “As Elon Musk continues to build his tech conglomerate, we won’t be surprised to see him bounce back too at some point in the future,” Guinness wrote in a blog post.
Musk does not hold the title of the richest man on earth; he lost that title to Bernard Arnault. However, he isn’t broke; according to Forbes, Musk is worth $144 billion.
