After the wind of euphoria that blew in the technological sphere during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is now grimace soup at Gafam. With market capitalizations falling sharply on Wall Street this year, gloomy growth prospects and massive layoff plans, the past few months have been painful for Meta, Amazon, Tesla or Netflix. As a result, the American billionaires at the helm of these tech behemoths saw their fortunes plummet in 2022. Rest assured, they still have a few tens of billions of dollars left to survive.
Thus, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who disputed a few months ago the symbolic title of the richest man in the world, were capped at the post by Bernard Arnault, the boss of LVMH, who now enjoys a fortune. $165 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Behind him, Elon Musk must settle for second place with a tidy sum of 138 billion dollars. But the Tesla boss has had a chaotic year with the incredible takeover of Twitter and the sharp drop in the action of his electric vehicle company, with shareholders appreciating less and less the escapades of the whimsical American entrepreneur of South African origin. In 2022, the fortune of the latter has thus fallen by 132 billion dollars.
A little further back since leaving the reins of Amazon to Andy Jassy in the summer of 2021, Jeff Bezos is no longer on the podium of the richest men in the world. He only comes in sixth, with an estimated loot of $107 billion. As the e-commerce giant’s valuation has halved this year, the Amazon founder’s fortunes have been hit hard. It has thus melted by 85.2 billion dollars since January.
As for Mark Zuckerberg, the year 2022 will have been an ordeal for him from start to finish. Sluggish growth, very hostile regulators, low morale in the workforce, plummeting shareholder confidence… The boss of Meta will want to quickly forget these last few months, although the year 2023 may be in the same vein. And for good reason, the offensive of the American group in the metaverse is far from bearing fruit for the moment.
The Horizon Worlds platform, the first draft of this virtual world, has less than 200,000 monthly active users while it initially targeted 500,000 by the end of the year. A real fiasco despite burning $20.9 billion in two years to build this metaverse. The valuation of Meta has thus collapsed by two thirds of its value since the beginning of the year. Mark Zuckerberg is now the 25th richest man in the world, with a fortune cut by $79.9 billion since January. There is still 45.6 billion dollars left to the head of the parent company of Meta.