The artificial intelligence wave in 2023 will make leaders in the technology industry richer.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the wealth of wealthy people in the technology industry increased by 48% in 2023, with an increase of US$658 billion (approximately 4,671.7 billion yuan).
Among them, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk’s wealth has increased the most (92 billion U.S. dollars), and his net worth of 229 billion U.S. dollars has also allowed him to rise from Arnault, chairman of French LVMH Moët Hennessy Group (Bernard Arnault) regained his identity as the world's richest man.
Overall, 77% of the top 500 richest people on the list have increased their wealth in 2023, and their total net assets have surged by US$1.5 trillion. Just the previous year, the wealth of the top 500 richest people shrank by a total of US$1.4 trillion.
But among the 50 richest people, 12 will see their wealth shrink in 2023. Among them, the one with the largest decline in wealth was Gautam Adani, founder and chairman of India's Adani Group. His net worth lost US$36.2 billion, but he still ranked 15th on the rich list with a net worth of US$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 in making wealth
After acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in the second half of 2022, Tesla’s experience in taking charge of the social media platform was not smooth. Musk first announced his resignation as Twitter CEO in May last year, and then announced in July that Twitter would be renamed x. By the end of the year, major companies such as Apple, Disney and Walmart said they would no longer advertise on the X platform.
However, the performance of Tesla, the pillar business of Musk’s assets and his electric car company, is very satisfactory. In 2023, the company's stock price more than doubled, and its market value reached $778.6 billion.
is ranked according to the value of wealth added in 2023. In addition to Musk, the people with the most wealth expansion on the list are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, an American social media platform, and Amazon. Founder Jeff Bezos, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Spanish fast fashion giant and Zara founder O Amancio Ortega, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison.
Most of these people have seen their wealth increase in large part due to the strong performance of the stock market. In 2023, all three major U.S. stock indexes achieved double-digit percentage growth. The Nasdaq index, which is dominated by technology stocks, rose 44.52% in one year and exceeded 15,000 points. Irene Tunkel, chief strategist of the U.S. Asset Department of
investment consulting company BCA Research, told China Business News that in 2023, a new generation of artificial intelligence will become one of the few lasting drivers of the stock market. In addition, from the perspective of market concentration, the market's rise is mainly driven by a few companies.
is the so-called "Magnificent Seven", including Apple, Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla. The seven companies mentioned above account for about two-thirds of the S&P 500's gains in 2023, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.
For example, in 2022, meta's stock price collapsed because shareholders were worried that meta was spending too much money to enter the "metaverse" and neglecting its main business. But in the past year, meta has regained almost all its lost ground. Its stock price rose from $124.74 at the beginning of last year to $353.96 at the end of the year, a surge of 194%.
But judging from the top 50 rich people, Zuckerberg is not the most proud. The wealth of prajogo pangestu, the 79-year-old founder and president of Indonesia's Barito Pacific Group, surged sevenfold last year, catapulting him to the 48th place on the rich list. His main financial source is the coal mining company Petrindo Jaya Kreasi, which was listed in March last year. The company's market value increased 25 times in just nine months to US$5.4 billion.
In addition, Ortega, Spain's richest man, fell out of the top 20 in 2022, but his net worth increased by $32 billion compared with 2022 due to the huge profits of his company Inditex and the stock market performance.
Who is frustrated in 2023
Arnault briefly became the world's richest man in 2022, but his personal wealth increased by only 10.5%, or 17 billion, in 2023 as concerns about a weakening U.S. economy dampened demand for luxury goods. US dollars (ranked 17th in terms of value added). According to the list, his current net worth is $179 billion.
In 2023, the group’s share price rose only 5.7% to 733.60 euros. LVMH is also no longer Europe's most valuable company, a title that now belongs to Denmark's Novo Nordisk.
In contrast, the losses of some wealthy people are more obvious. The wealth of Indonesian tycoon Adani fell to US$84.3 billion, a decrease of US$36 billion, and his ranking fell from third to 15th. Shares in the Adani family company fell sharply last year after an investor accused the company of running "the biggest scam in corporate history."
In addition, the food industry in 2023 does not seem to be easy. The wealth of the Giovanni Ferrero & family, an Italian chocolate and cookie business, has shrunk by US$8.26 billion. The Mars brothers and sisters, heirs to the Mars Group in the United States, have lost US$8.16 billion in wealth. Leonard Lauder, the former chairman of cosmetics group Estee Lauder, and Harold Hamm, chairman and CEO of Continental Resources, both saw their net worth drop by more than $6 billion.
