Wednesday, October 10th was a bit of a rough day for financial markets all over the world, and American billionaires like Amazon's Jeff Bezos were hit the hardest, if you count how much they lost and not how much they have left. Bezos himself took a hit of around $9.1 billion, while all 500 of the richest people on Earth lost a combined sum of around $99 billion. Those American billionaires I mentioned? Their collective hit at the end of the day came to $54.5 billion.
Of that select group, it was Bezos himself who lost the most of his sizable fortune thanks to the day's financial dip. Second place in that dubious field went to both Warren Buffett as well as Europe's richest person Bernard Arnault, both of whom lost $4.5 billion each. Proportionately the day hit Arnault pretty hard, since $4.5 billion represents more than half of the tycoon's financial gains for the year, but the figure also measures up to 4.9 percent of Buffett's total net worth. And the plunge came at a time that was probably already bad enough for Arnault's liking, who saw a loss of about $3.5 billion on Friday after news of increased border checks in China reported by Bloomberg to be aimed at unauthorized imports of popular items from brands like Louis Vuitton and Berluti, both of which fall under Arnault's LVMH luxury brand umbrella.
In the last few weeks, Jeff Bezos' net worth has dropped from an all-time high of $170 billion to $145 billion.
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Kering's François-Henri Pinault and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg tied for third, with hits of $2.5 billion each to their personal fortunes. All of the above were part of a group of 17 individuals who lost at least a billion dollars over the course of the day. Other group stats for this second most precipitous single day drop in recent memory include tech titans like Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, the 67 wealthiest of whom took a combined hit of $32.1 billion.
