Elon Musk briefly loses world's richest person title to Louis Vuitton's Arnault

Agencies | Washington                   

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com  

Twitter owner and Tesla boss Elon Musk briefly lost his title as the world's richest person on Wednesday, according to Forbes, following a steep drop in the value of his stakes in the electric-car maker, and a $44 billion bet on the social media firm.

Bernard Arnault — the chief executive of luxury brand Louis Vuitton's parent company LVMH — and his family briefly took the title as the world's richest, but were back at No 2, with a personal wealth of $185.3 billion, according to Forbes.

Musk — who has held the top spot on the Forbes list since September 2021 — has a net worth of $185.7 billion. He took over the title from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Tesla shares — which have lost more than 47 per cent in value since Musk made his offer to buy Twitter earlier this year — were down 2.7 per cent.

Musk's net worth dropped below $200 billion earlier on November 8 as investors dumped Tesla's shares on worries that the top executive and largest shareholder of the world's most valuable electric-vehicle maker was more preoccupied with Twitter.

Tesla has lost nearly half its market value, and Musk's net worth has dropped by about $70 billion since he bid for Twitter in April. He closed the deal for Twitter in October with $13 billion in loans and a $33.5 billion equity commitment.

Besides Tesla, Musk also heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces for various groundbreaking purposes.