In one of the largest fall in fortunes in over a decade, the world’s 500 richest people saw a tumble in combined wealth to the tune of $208 billion, after US President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs.
Among the hardest-hit was Facebook and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, with a fall of $17.9 billion in fortune, amounting to a nine per cent decline in wealth.
The plunge is the fourth-largest single-day decline in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index’s 13-year history, and the largest since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. After the tariffs were announced, the most affected in the list of billionaires were those from the US.
Among others to be hit was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, smart from a nine per cent plunge in shares, the biggest the company has seen since April 2022. This cost him $15.9 billion in personal wealth. Trump’s close friend and government advisor Elon Musk lost $11 billion, after Tesla shares fell 5.5 per cent.
Among other US billionaires whose wealth slid were Michael Dell ($9.53 billion), Larry Ellison ($8.1 billion), Jensen Huang ($7.36 billion), Larry Page ($4.79 billion), Sergey Brin ($4.46 billion) and Thomas Peterffy ($4.06 billion).
The only billionaire from outside the US who was among the billionaires who saw a significant plunge in fortune was France’s Bernard Arnault. The European Union braces for a new 20 per cent flat tariff on all products bound for the US, which is expected to hurt exports of alcohol and luxury goods, among other things. Arnault’s LVMH, a conglomerate which owns brands including Christian Dior, Bulgari and Loro Piana, saw its shares fall in Paris, wiping $6 billion off the net worth of Europe’s richest person.
Trump reserved some of the highest tariffs for what he called “nations that treat us badly”. That included an additional 34 per cent on goods from China — bringing the new added tariff rate there to 54 per cent. The figure for the European Union was 20 per cent, and 24 per cent on Japan.
