Per Bloomberg:
Before Jerome Powell took the podium today, stocks were approaching their highest levels in six weeks, fueling a rebound in the fortunes of some of the world’s richest people after a brutal year.
Just as he did in August during an eight-minute speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, however, the Federal Reserve chair talked tough on inflation, squashing investor hopes of a decisive pivot away from tightening monetary policy and knocking stocks to the lowest in more than a week.
In the span of that hour-and-a-half from when Powell started speaking to the US stock market close, the top 500 people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index lost about $59 billion on their public holdings.
In total, Elon Musk saw $9 billion erased from his fortune on Wednesday, Jeff Bezos’s wealth declined by $4.8 billion, and Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer and Sergey Brin each lost more than $2 billion. The collective net worth of this group of tech billionaires has tumbled by more than $300 billion this year with the US central bank embarking on its most aggressive interest-rate hike campaign in decades.
