Elon Musk briefly loses title as world's richest person

Tesla boss Elon Musk briefly lost his title as the world's richest person on Wednesday, according to Forbes, following a steep drop in the value of his stake in the electric-car maker and a $44 billion bet on Twitter.

Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury brand Louis Vuitton's parent company LVMH and his family briefly took the title as the world's richest, but were back at No. 2 with a personal wealth of $185.3 billion, according to Forbes.
 
Twitter owner Elon Musk has held the top spot on the Forbes list since September 2021 and has a net worth of $185.7 billion. Musk took over the title from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Tesla shares, which have lost more than 47 per cent in value since Musk made his offer to buy Twitter earlier this year, were down 2.7 per cent.

Musk's net worth dropped below $200 billion earlier on Nov. 8 as investors dumped Tesla's shares on worries the top executive and largest shareholder of the world's most valuable electric-vehicle maker is more preoccupied with Twitter.

Tesla has lost nearly half its market value and Musk's net worth has dropped by about $70 billion since he bid for Twitter in April. Musk closed the deal for Twitter in October with $13 billion in loans and a $33.5 billion equity commitment.

Besides Tesla, Musk also heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.