The fortunes of Silicon Valley billionaires took a beating last year as share prices of the world’s tech giants plummeted.
Here are some of the worst hit by this year’s tech stock downturn.
ELON MUSK
Photo: AFP
After becoming the world’s richest person in October 2021, the Tesla Inc and SpaceX CEO saw more than half of his net worth evaporate last year, boosting France’s luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault into the top spot.
Musk lost US$140 billion over the year, due to the collapse of Tesla’s share price, leaving his total net worth at US$130 billion, Bloomberg’s index of the world’s richest people showed.
Once the darling of Wall Street investors, the future of the electric vehicle company is under question after Musk pushed through with a US$44 billion buyout of Twitter Inc that many observers see as an expensive distraction.
Photo: REUTERS
Musk largely financed his buyout of Twitter by selling off shares in Tesla, putting the share price into an even steeper downward spiral.
MARK ZUCKERBERG
The Facebook cofounder has put all his efforts into promoting the so-called metaverse, but investors are not as confident that the world will be going completely virtual anytime soon.
Photo: REUTERS
The share price in Meta Platforms Inc, Facebook’s parent company, fell off a cliff last year.
Wall Street’s lack of confidence has sliced US$81 billion off of Zuckerberg’s fortune, leaving it at US$44.4 billion as of Wednesday.
Meta has faced stiff competition from breakout app TikTok and — like archrival Google — is plagued by a morose advertising market as the world economy faces a downturn amid high inflation.
JEFF BEZOS
Since stepping down as CEO of Amazon.com Inc in July 2021, Bezos has devoted much of his time to developing space exploration projects through his company Blue Origin.
However, his fortune remains heavily tied to the online retail giant’s share price, which fell by more than 49 percent last year.
Bezos, who remains Amazon’s executive chairman, lost more than US$86 billion last year, leaving a fortune estimated at US$106 billion.
The 58-year-old entrepreneur and owner of the Washington Post, who preceded Musk as the world’s richest person, in November told CNN that he is planning to donate most of his wealth to charity during his lifetime.
LARRY PAGE, SERGEY BRIN
The two Google cofounders have not helmed the company since 2019, but remain board members of parent company Alphabet Inc, which also owns health, artificial intelligence and other subsidiaries.
Alphabet’s share price has declined 39 percent since January last year, punished by declining online advertising revenues, and increased competition from Apple and Amazon.
Page’s wealth is down to US$46.1 billion and Brin’s is down to US$44.8 billion.
However, they are still the 10th and 11th-richest people on the planet.
ZHANG YIMING
Chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming (張一鳴) is an outlier to the tech debacle.
The founder of TikTok-owner ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) last year saw his fortune rise by US$10.4 billion.
His US$55 billion net worth makes him the second-richest person in China and 23rd-richest person in the world.
However, storm clouds are looming for TikTok, as political pressure builds in Washington over accusations that the video-sharing app’s immense success leaves the US vulnerable to the Chinese Communist Party-led authorities in Beijing.
US officials have banned TikTok on government smartphones and are reportedly mulling whether to force Bytedance to sell its US version of the app.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts