Billionaire Elon Musk has intermittently ceded the top spot on the world’s wealth rankings, a shift that occurs with notable frequency. At times, Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and his family, sits in first place. The dynamic positions reflect rapid market moves and weekend adjustments that real-time trackers capture in seconds.
In one notable moment, Musk relinquished the lead to Arnault as Forbes tallied the fortunes at about $184.6 billion for Musk and $185.1 billion for Arnault and his relatives. Moments later, Musk’s net worth rose to roughly $185.8 billion while Arnault’s fell to about $184.7 billion, highlighting the volatility of billionaire wealth that can swing by roughly a billion dollars in a day.
The Forbes list is refreshed in real time, illustrating how quickly fortunes can swing on movements in stock prices, asset values, and related markets. Reuters has noted that part of Musk’s volatility stems from the need to liquidate Tesla shares to fund the Twitter purchase, a decision that can influence his reported wealth measured across multiple platforms.
By the end of October, Forbes reported that Musk had shed more than a third of his wealth since early November the previous year. A year earlier, the magazine estimated his fortune at $320.3 billion in the fall, with October showing $209.4 billion. Within that October alone, Musk experienced a loss of about $28 billion in value.
Tesla’s earnings report for the third quarter, released in late October, showed revenue of $21.5 billion, just below Wall Street expectations of around $22 billion. The quarterly performance added to the broader picture of how investor sentiment has shifted in response to the company’s results.
On November 1, 2021, Musk’s wealth briefly surpassed the $300 billion mark, a milestone that marked him as the first person in history to cross that threshold. A year later, Tesla’s market trajectory and broader market factors influenced the shifts seen in the billionaire rankings.
Bloomberg ranking
According to the Bloomberg billionaire index, Musk remains at the head of the list with an estimated fortune of about $179 billion, reflecting a slight decrease from a previous figure of $181.29 billion. Bernard Arnault follows in second place with around $165 billion, showing a notable decline, while Indian billionaire Gautam Adani sits in third with roughly $127 billion, with a modest uptick noted in recent calculations.
By the end of the year, Bloomberg reported that Musk’s wealth had declined by more than $100 billion since the start of 2022, underscoring the sensitivity of the wealth rankings to fluctuations in equity markets and asset valuations.
Acquisition of Twitter
At the close of October, Musk completed the purchase of Twitter, a move he described as freeing the platform from certain burdens. The deal, valued at $44 billion, had been in the works since it became public in April, drawing intense coverage across major business outlets throughout the negotiation process.
Following the acquisition, Musk dismissed several top executives at Twitter, accusing leadership of misleading him and investors amid concerns over the platform’s bot accounts. After these leadership changes, Musk took the reins of the company personally, outlining plans for strategic direction and emphasizing his aim to protect and expand freedom of expression on the social network. He also addressed advertisers, stressing that Twitter should not become a chaotic space without accountability.
On October 27, during the pending deal closures between Twitter and Musk, he shifted his billionaire status to the informal title of “Chief Twit.” He also directed the unblocking of profiles associated with high-profile figures, while reinstating certain accounts after review, including political figures where applicable, amid ongoing debates about content moderation and safety on the platform.