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The Markets
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Manufacturing & engineering

Why Elon Musk can dust off tabloid hysteria

When counting US$31bn of losses over seven months it is useful to retain some perspective.

There are 239 billion good reasons why Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) chief executive and 'the closest thing in the real world to Tony Stark', can brush off the heightened hysteria and tabloid circus that's followed him in recent weeks.

You'd be forgiven for thinking Elon's having a terrible time of it.

But, financially, at least, the world’s richest man (according to publicly available metrics) has been coping quite well even if he's US$31bn worse off in 2022 so far.

Whilst an eye-watering sum by almost anyone else's measure, Musk's losses look positively favorable compared to the US$47.5bn lost this year by his space race arch-rival Jeff Bezos, whose estimated worth of US$145bn is still dwarfed by more than US$90bn next to Musk's.

Against Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who each have shed about US$30bn (to be worth US$98bn and US$92bn respectively), there's barely daylight between their losses for the year.

Similarly, LVMH boss Bernard Arnault has also had a worse 2022 than Musk with US$39bn of losses albeit at an estimated US$138bn the Luis Vuitton and Gucci magnate still hold third position on Bloomberg's Billionaire's index.

After throwing himself further into the spotlight with his tilt for Twitter, Musk, meanwhile, last night said he now plans to keep his head down.

The amount of attention on me has gone supernova, which super sucks. Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks :(

Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2022

Value-investing guru Warren Buffett, elsewhere, outperformed almost everyone in Bloomberg's top ten (with the exception of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani) as his bear market losses are estimated to have been confined to only US$8bn, down to US$100bn.

It bodes well for the investor who famously said it's wise to "be greedy when others are fearful".

Buffett, meanwhile, has spent the downturn piling into HP, Citigroup and Occidental Petroleum shares.

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