Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has lost $77 billion of his personal fortune, is not the only tech billionaire hit by the wave of market slumps that have erased most of the pandemic-induced gains.
Stock markets around the world have been experiencing downturns as the global economy battles with inflation and recession. At the receiving end are tech companies, and by extension – their founders and CEOs.
In a series of stock plunge involving tech companies, Netflix has lost 60% of its stock; Meta has gone down about 58%, while Google and Amazon stocks have both nosedived around 30% year-to-date in 2022, according to Google Finance.
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This backdrop means that tech industry leaders are also losing their personal wealth. According to Forbes 400 list that valued 400 richest Americans for the year 2022, American tech billionaires have collectively lost a staggering $315 billion since last year. But this doesn’t mean that they have become poorer when compared to their net worth before the pandemic.
Analysis made by Vox, which compared the pre-pandemic wealth of the tech leaders to the present, found that although there have been huge losses; they are still richer than they were in 2019.
For instance, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lost $50 billion in 2022, depleting his net worth to around $151 billion, according to Forbes. But compared to his 2019 $115 billion fortune, he’s still 32% richer in 2022 than he was before the pandemic. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has lost $28 billion, only went back to his pre-pandemic net worth of $106 billion. Google founder Sergey Brin, another character in the list, saw his fortune moved up by about $35.5 billion compared to 2019.
Vox noted that of the 65 billionaires on the Forbes 400 who are categorized under tech — which includes the likes of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — 56 are richer than they were in 2019, despite the current downturn.
“On the one hand, $315 billion is a lot,” said Chase Peterson-Withorn, deputy editor of Forbes’s wealth team, which compiles and edits the Forbes 400 list. “But they’re all doing fine. These are people who are extremely wealthy.”
Due to the sheer size of their fortunes, “tech leaders probably swing more than other people in dollar terms,” he added.
With the unprecedented boom in tech wealth in the last three years, the majority of the tech industry leaders amassed massive personal fortunes that appear to have been solidified beyond the 2019 volumes. Though for some, it’s a different story.
For instance, Zuckerberg losing $77 billion has dropped his net worth to $57.7 billion, about 17% short of his 2019 personal fortune valued at $69.6 billion. Vox noted that Dustin Moskovitz, who co-founded Facebook with Zuckerberg, has also seen his fortune shrink, from $11.6 billion in 2019 to $8.1 billion in 2022.
Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom, whose net worth was buoyed by the pandemic-induced shift to virtual meetings, also has seen his fortune plummet as life returns to normal and offices reopen. Zoom has lost much of its market value – its stock has fallen from a peak price of $588.84 per share in October 2020, to around $75, where it is currently trading. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates that Yuan was worth around $4.78 billion on September 2 2019. Now, his fortune has dropped to $3.9 billion, according to the Forbes 400 list.
However, the unprecedented tech industry growth, which has also birthed a new crop of billionaires, is believed by some analysts to be unsustainable. The reason they say, is because the stocks are overvalued.
“[People] think the past is representative of the future, and confuse past performance with investment quality going forward,” Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, a professor of finance at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, told Recode over email. “It is counterproductive. Something with tearaway past performance is more likely to be overvalued.”
“I agree that some stocks did become unsustainably overvalued precisely because of this bias,” he added.