Elon Musk is no longer the world’s richest person after Tesla Inc. shares slid 8.6 percent on Monday. The drop in shares resulted in a decrease of $15.2 billion from Musk’s net worth. He was replaced by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos as the richest person on the list.
Musk had recently emerged as one of the biggest backers of cryptocurrency. His tweets in support of Bitcoin and Dogecoin boosted the market value of both cryptocurrencies. However, his most recent tweets might have cost him the top place on the Forbes rich list.
The sharp decline in Tesla stock was recorded after Musk tweeted that the values of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ether “do seem high”.
This not only fuelled a sharp decline in Tesla’s share but also led to a major fall in Bitcoin’s price. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency saw as much as a 12.5 percent decline on Tuesday. It had earlier boomed to a record value of $58000 but came tumbling down to $46000.
The tweet came just two weeks after Tesla had added $1.5 billion in Bitcoin to its balance sheet. The company had also announced that it is ready to accept cryptocurrency as a means of payment for its electric cars.
Musk was replying to Peter Schiff – a crypto skeptic and gold bug – who said the precious metal is better than Bitcoin and fiat money.
“Money is just data that allows us to avoid the inconvenience of barter,” Musk tweeted. “That data, like all data, is subject to latency & error.” In the following post, he added, “that said, BTC & ETH do seem high lol.”
Last week, Musk claimed he was not behind Tesla’s decision to buy $1.5bn in Bitcoin, and that it was a company business move.
“Tesla’s action is not directly reflective of my opinion,” he tweeted.
He also called Bitcoin a “less dumb” version of cash.
“Having some bitcoin, which is simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash, is adventurous enough for an S&P 500 company. When fiat currency has negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere. Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money. The key word is ‘almost’.”
Elon Musk dropped to second on the list of the world’s richest people with a net worth of $183.4 billion. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos reclaimed the top spot even as his fortune fell by $3.7 billion to $186.3 billion.
The two have been head-to-head since the beginning of the year, with Musk overtaking Bezos for the first time after Tesla shares soared in early January.
Bezos reclaimed the top spot a few weeks later but was briefly left behind again as Musk’s rocket company SpaceX raised $850m earlier this month, with the company being valued at $74 billion.