The fortune of the Tesla founder and new owner of Twitter has plummeted 40% in about two months. Tesla, its largest asset, has lost nearly two-thirds of its value in the past year.

Elon Musk’s destruction of wealth has gone down in history.

The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter is worth $137 billion (about 129 billion euros), according to Bloomberg Billionaires IndexWhich is enough to rank him second in the list of the richest people in the world after the Chairman of the Board of Directors of LVMH, Bernard Arnault. But at its peak, in November 2021, Musk had a net worth of $340 billion (€321 billion).

This makes Musk the first person to lose $200 billion in wealth, as Bloomberg reported last week.

Most of Musk’s fortune is tied to Tesla, the electric car maker whose shares fell 65% in 2022. Demand for Tesla products weakened as well-known automakers ramped up competition from electric vehicles last year. The company failed to meet growth targets and cut production in China. And its fourth-quarter deliveries, which were reported on Monday, fell short of Wall Street estimates.

The waning interest of car buyers in Teslas was demonstrated last month, after the company announced a rare sale in an effort to liquidate shares: Tesla offered two discounts to buyers who accepted car delivery before the end of the year, initially at a discount of $3,750 (3,560 euros), later doubled to $7,500. dollars (7,120 euros) with another two weeks in 2022.

Investors were wary of the discounts, which sent the stock down 37% in December.

Critics have long wondered if Tesla was worth the $1 billion that went public in early 2022. At its peak, the company was worth more than the world’s top 12 automakers combined, despite owning a fraction of your sales. Tesla finished the year with a valuation of $386 billion (€266 billion) — still well above its automaker rivals, but well below tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon — with which it was benchmarked a year earlier.

Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter didn’t help Tesla — or Musk’s personal fortune. Elon Musk, Tesla’s largest shareholder, has sold $23 billion worth of Tesla stock since his interest in Twitter became public in April.

His constant tweets and increasingly erratic behavior, especially after he took over as CEO of Twitter, have angered Tesla investors, who want Musk to pay more attention to their larger and more valuable company. Musk has defended himself against critics by saying he hasn’t missed a big Tesla meeting since taking charge of Twitter.

Tesla stock could rebound, and Musk could return to being the richest person in the world. But Elon Musk’s reputation as a genius suffered massive damage in 2022 – almost as badly as his personal fortune.