That which goes up, must come down.
And, for Elon Musk, it’s really coming down.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO saw his fortune skyrocket during 2020, rising more than 700 percent, but just last week the attrition has been dramatic.
Musk lost $27 billion over the past five days, owed primarily to Tesla’s shares becoming caught up in the massive tech selloff since Monday.
Attrition is relative, of course, since Musk’s net worth is still north of $150 billion, but Musk’s pride may have taken a hit.
That pesky Jeff Bezos moved ahead of Musk this week on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index by a cool $20 billion.
With Musk’s number hitting $210 billion in January, he had climbed to No. 1 helped by the strength of SpaceX, which raised $850 million to raise its value to $74 billion, up 60% from last summer.
The volatility of Musk’s holdings is also partly due to Musk’s commitment to bitcoin – a very temperamental investment.
Tesla announced in February that it purchased $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency, but when Musk tweeted that the prices of “BTC (Bitcoin) and ETH (Ethereum, another major cryptocurrency) do seem high lol,” Musk’s fortunes went south to the tune of about $15 billion, according to a Yahoo Finance story.
Musk also affected the fortunes of joke/meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, and continued on Friday by tweeting, “Doge spelled backwards is Egod” to his 48.5 million followers.
The fade began late last month when Musk – perhaps too transparent on Twitter – shared disappointment in Tesla’s Model Y Standard Range SUV.
“It is still available off menu, but I don’t think the range, in many drive conditions, yet meets the Tesla standard of excellence,” he wrote on Feb. 22.
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