SpaceX founder loses second spot to LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault
Elon Musk has dropped out of his spot as the world’s second-richest man, falling below Louis Vuitton chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault after Tesla’s share price sank.
Musk’s fortune sank by $3.16 billion on Monday, to $160.6 billion, marking a 24 percent decline from its January high, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index.
As recently as March, the Tesla CEO and ‘Technoking’ had topped the list as the world’s richest man, but now sits below Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Arnault, the French billionaire who runs LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
On Monday, Bezos had a fortune valued at $190 billion, and Arnault was at $161.2 billion.
The eye-watering fortunes topping the list are composed primarily of stock holdings, meaning that their values fluctuate daily with changes in the stock market.
Musk’s latest net worth fall comes as a co-creator of Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency Musk has gotten behind – and then seemed to abandon – called the Tesla founder a ‘self-absorbed grifter.’
It also comes after Musk sent the price of Bitcoin tumbling as much as 15 percent over the weekend with tweets saying that Tesla would no longer accept the cryptocurrency from customers, citing environmental concerns over the energy used to process transactions.
Tesla holds a reserve of Bitcoin that cost the company about $1.3 billion, linking the company’s share price to the volatile cryptocurrency.
On Sunday Musk suggested in a cryptic tweet that Tesla could have dumped the remainder of its Bitcoin holdings.
But in the early hours of Monday, he tweeted: ‘To clarify speculation, Tesla has not sold any Bitcoin.’
After hitting an all time high of $64,829.14 last month, the price of Bitcoin dropped below $45,000 for the first time in three months on Monday. The cryptocurrency was at $43,637.90 on Tuesday morning.
Tesla shares dropped again in early trading on Tuesday, hurt by news that the California Department of Motor Vehicles is reviewing whether Tesla is violating a state regulation by advertising its vehicles as being fully autonomous.
State regulation prohibits advertising vehicles for sale or lease as autonomous if they can’t comply with the regulatory definition, the agency said.
Tesla advertises a $10,000 ‘Full Self-Driving’ option on the website for its electric vehicles, but the same website says the vehicles cannot drive themselves.
Tesla’s driver assistant features, which the company describes as ‘Autopilot’ or ‘full self-driving’ are under growing scrutiny following a series of accidents and online videos of Tesla cars driving with no one in the driver’s seat.
Tesla charges $10,000 for its semi-automated features such as lane changing and parking assistance under its full self-driving (FSD) software.
Tesla says on its website that the features do not make the vehicle autonomous, but the term FSD is widely used by Musk, who has over 50 million Twitter followers.
The probe comes amid several high-profile crashes nationwide – including a fatal wreck in California – involving Autopilot in recent weeks.
On Saturday, a Tesla in autopilot mode plowed into a Snohomish County deputy´s patrol car north of Seattle, causing significant damage but no injuries.
A 35-year-old man was killed on May 5 in Fontana, California, when his Tesla Model 3 struck an overturned semi on a freeway east of Los Angeles about 2.30am.