Billionaires poised to lose near half-trillion US dollars in two days

[NEW YORK] The world’s 500 richest people suffered the biggest two-day loss ever on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as fallout from US President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement decimated markets across the globe.

Billionaires on the wealth list lost a collective US$536 billion from Thursday’s (Apr 3) stock market open to Friday’s close as the S&P 500 Index dropped 10.5 per cent over the two days and the Nasdaq Composite fell 11.4 per cent.

Friday’s US$329 billion drop was the largest since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, swamping on Thursday’s US$208 billion slide. Almost 90 per cent of the billionaires tracked by the wealth index saw their fortunes fall on Friday, with an average decline of 3.5 per cent.

No one lost more over the two-day stretch than Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk. The carmaker’s stock plunged more than 10 per cent on Friday, dragging Musk’s net worth down US$31 billion from Thursday’s open and bringing his yearly losses to US$130 billion. Meta Platforms founder Mark Zuckerberg followed with a US$27 billion loss as the social media company dropped almost 14 per cent over the two-day stretch. Carvana CEO Ernest Garcia III’s two-day loss of US$2 billion was enough to push him off the list of the world’s 500 richest people. His used-car retailer’s stock lost 28 per cent over the period.

Nike founder Phil Knight was one of the few winners on Friday. The shoe company’s stock gained 2.8 per cent after Trump said that he’d had a “very productive call” with Vietnamese leader To Lam over possibly eliminating a 46 per cent tariff unveiled yesterday on the South-east Asian country, where much of Nike’s manufacturing is done. The stock’s rise added US$84 million to Knight’s net worth on the day, reversing Thursday’s US$3 billion loss.

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim fared opposite. The mogul behind mobile-phone operator America Movil SAB narrowly was in the black on Thursday as Mexico’s exclusion from the White House’s list of tariff targets pushed the country’s main index up slightly. On Friday, though, Slim reversed those gains and then some, losing US$5.5 billion as the Mexican Bolsa fell 4.9 per cent. BLOOMBERG