The wave of artificial intelligence in 2023 has made the leaders of the technology industry richer.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the wealth of the wealthy in the tech sector increased by 48% in 2023 to US$658 billion (about 4,671.7 billion yuan).
Among them, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) has the largest increase in wealth ($92 billion), and his net worth of $229 billion has also allowed him to regain the status of the world's richest man from Bernard Arnault, chairman of the French LVMH group.
Overall, 77% of the top 500 richest people on the list in 2023 have increased their wealth, and their combined net worth has surged by 1$5 trillion. And just the year before, the wealth of the top 500 richest people had shrunk by 1$4 trillion.
But 12 of the 50 richest people have seen their fortunes shrink in 2023. Among them, the largest wealth** is Gautam Adani, the founder and chairman of India's Adani Group, who lost $36.2 billion in net worth, but he still ranks 15th on the rich list with a net worth of $84.3 billion.
Among the top 500 billionaires, there are 189 in the United States, 23 in India, 20 in Germany, 17 in the United Kingdom, and 13 in France.
Technology companies are still the main force to get rich.
After buying Twitter for $44 billion in the second half of 2022, Tesla's experience at the helm of the social ** platform has not been smooth. Musk first said that he would step down as Twitter's CEO in May last year, and then announced in July that he would change the name of Twitter to X. By the end of the year, major companies such as Apple, Disney and Walmart said they would no longer advertise on platform X.
However, Tesla, the backbone of Musk's assets, has been doing very well. In 2023, the company's share price more than doubled, and its market capitalization also reached $778.6 billion.
According to the increase in wealth value in 2023, in addition to Musk, the most inflated wealth on the list are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, the parent company of the American social ** platform Facebook, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, Larry Page and Sergey, co-founders of Google Brin), Spanish fast fashion giant Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle.
The increase in wealth for most of them was largely due to the strong performance of **. In 2023, all three major U.S. stock indexes achieved double-digit percentage growth. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index grew by 44 in a year52%, breaking through 15,000 points.
Irene Tunkel, chief strategist of the U.S. Assets Department of BCA Research, an investment consulting firm, told the first financial reporter that in 2023, a new generation of artificial intelligence will become one of the few lasting driving forces. In addition, from the perspective of market concentration, the rise of ** is also mainly driven by a few companies.
The so-called "Gorgeous Seven" include Apple, Microsoft, Google's parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla. According to S&P Dow Jones Indices, the seven companies mentioned above accounted for about two-thirds of the S&P 500's gains in 2023.
For example, in 2022, Meta's stock price collapsed as shareholders feared that Meta would spend too much money on its entry into the "metaverse" and neglected its main business. But in the past year, Meta has regained almost all of its lost ground. Its share price jumped from 124 at the beginning of last year$74 all the way to $353 at the end of the year$96, up 194%.
But judging from the top 50 richest lists, Zuckerberg is not the most proud. Prajogo Pangestu, the 79-year-old founder and president of Indonesia's Barito Pacific Group, saw his fortune soar sevenfold last year, rising to No. 48 on the rich list. His main source of wealth is Petrido Jaya Krasi, a coal mining company that went public in March last year, which has grown 25-fold in market value to $5.4 billion in just nine months.
In addition, Ortega, Spain's richest man, fell out of the top 20 in 2022, but his net worth increased by $32 billion compared to 2022 thanks to the huge profits and performance of his company Inditex.
Who is disappointed in 2023.
Arnault became the world's richest man at one point in 2022, but Arnault's personal wealth grew by only 10 percent in 2023 as concerns about a weak U.S. economy dampened demand for luxury goods5%, or $17 billion (17th by value added). According to the list, his current net worth is $179 billion.
In 2023, the group's share price will only increase by 57% to 73360 euros. LVMH is also no longer the most valuable company in Europe, a title that currently belongs to the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk.
In contrast, the losses of some wealthy are more pronounced. The wealth of Indonesia's richest man, Adani, fell by $36 billion to $84.3 billion, and his ranking also fell from third to 15th. Last year, the Adani family's share price fell sharply after an investor accused Adani of having carried out "the biggest ** in corporate history".
In addition, the food industry does not seem to be having a good time in 2023. Italy's Giovanni Ferrero & Family, which deals in chocolate and cookies, has lost 82 percent of its fortune600 million US dollars, the heirs of the Mars Group in the United States, the Mars siblings lost 81 percent of their wealth$600 million. Leonard Lauder, the former chairman of cosmetics group Estée Lauder, and Harold Hamm, chairman and chief executive of Continental Resources, both lost more than $6 billion in net worth.