Tech moguls lost a total of £344 billion in 2022

Financially, the past 12 months haven’t been good for tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos.

Leaders at Tesla, Meta, and formerly Amazon — along with many others — have seen their fortunes plummet as stock prices have plummeted.

A number of factors made 2022 a difficult year for the tech industry, including supply chain issues, falling consumer spending and less engagement from people as Covid-19 lockdowns ended.

This meant companies like Meta and Amazon were forced to lay off thousands of workers to try to cut costs.

Tesla (and now Twitter) boss Elon Musk’s net worth plummeted by a staggering $132 billion (£110 billion), causing him to lose his title of world’s richest person.

Musk’s space rival Jeff Bezos lost $84bn (£70bn) and Mark Zuckerberg, who is pushing his plans to forge the ‘metaverse’, lost $81bn (£67bn). While Zuckerberg used to consistently rank in the top 10 richest people in the world, he has now fallen to 25th place.

Even the tech billionaires who manage to stay out of the headlines have lost more money than whole communities will ever see in a generation.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, lost $44.6 billion (£37bn) and $43.4bn (£36bn) respectively, while former Microsoft chief Bill Gates saw his fortune plummet by 29 billion dollars (24 billion pounds) shrank.

Though Gates no longer runs Microsoft, he still owns many shares in the company. Microsoft’s shares are down about 30% this year.

Microsoft is not alone. Tech stocks have been down all year, and there’s no sign of a turnaround. At the close of the S&P 500 market yesterday, Apple was down 1.4% and Netflix was down 3.7%.

But the biggest decline of the entire index was Tesla, which fell 11.4%. The electric vehicle maker has temporarily halted production at a factory in Shanghai, according to published reports. And investors are concerned about Musk’s continued involvement with Twitter at Tesla’s expense.

MORE: Tycoon has to pay his ex-wife £37,000,000 for living the ‘billionaire lifestyle’

MORE: Elon Musk parodies Twitter account that drops Tesla bombs flagged for ‘context’