After Monday’s Wall Street crash, the wealthiest people in the world had a slight decrease in wealth.
The greatest loss was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose net worth dropped by $23 billion since the downturn started on Friday. Bezos is ranked second only to Elon Musk on Forbes’ list of billionaires.
The ten richest individuals on Forbes’ list lost a total of $36 billion on Monday.
Despite a $17 billion loss on Friday, Bezos’ fortune dropped by $6.4 billion, giving him a net worth of $180.7 billion, according to Forbes.
This year, Bezos has been selling off his stockpile of Amazon shares. In February, he sold $8.5 billion worth of Amazon shares, then in July, he revealed his intention to sell an additional approximately $5 billion worth of shares.
Fourth-placed CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg suffered a $4.3 billion loss on Monday.
That was somewhat better than the $4.9 billion drop in Elon Musk’s net worth, who founded both Tesla and SpaceX.
As of Monday, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, had each lost almost $6 billion, according to Forbes.
According to Forbes, Larry Ellison, a co-founder of the software business Oracle, experienced a $3 billion overnight increase in his wealth before it crashed on Monday, losing both the new gains and an additional $3 billion.
The market meltdown came after a weak US jobs data released on Friday, which revealed a notable decrease in hiring last month.
The July report revealed that last month’s job growth was only 114,000, far less than the 175,000 new posts predicted by economists.
Unemployment increased to 4.3%, exceeding analysts’ expectations of 4.1%.
The stock market was spooked by the poor report, the Fed’s hesitation to lower rates, and uncertainties surrounding the IT sector.
The craze has been heightened by Goldman Sachs analysts, who have raised their estimate of a recession from 15% to 25%.
Fears of a US recession spread around the world as markets around the world declined. The Nikkei 225 plummeted more than 12.5%, marking the largest sell-off Japan has seen since the Black Monday crash of 1987.