Great Britain is the fifth-largest economy in the world. So after the country voted to leave the European Union due to Friday’s infamous Brexit vote, there were sure to be large-scale economic reverberations. One of them is the pound plummeting in value, despite Prime Minister David Cameron waxing optimistic about the economy after the vote. And it turns out that even billionaires are losing a ton of money, because of the massive effect Brexit has had on global markets.
According to Bloomberg, which fastidiously tracks the net worth of the filthy rich, world markets took away $69.2 billion from the combined wealth of the 400 richest people in the world on Monday. This added onto a two-day loss of $196.2 billion from that handful of fat cats. Well, that almost makes me feel bad for a bunch of billionaires.
Interested in how much several specific rich people lost because of befuddled Leave voters like this one? Vanity Fair has pulled out some bold-faced names:
Monday’s markets were particularly brutal for the private-jet set. Germany’s Georg Schaeffler and H&M heir Stefan Persson got it the worst, both letting go of $1.9 billion. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Armancio Ortega were close behind, suffering $1.8 billion, $1.6 billion, and $1.5 billion losses, respectively. Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers, and Larry Ellison managed to keep their daily losses under $1 billion, all hovering near the $850,000 range.
The lesson here? Amazon ain’t nothing to mess with. In fact, $2 billion is probably chump change to these people. Still, those losses sound scary, especially when combined into that almost $200 billion figure.
And Brexit hasn’t been bad for other billionaires. Nineteen of them have added a lot of money to their personal fortunes in the past few days, with Japanese businessman Takemitsu Takezaki adding $579.3 million to his net worth. He currently has $10.3 billion. If you’re into this kind of thing, here’s a cute Bloomberg graphic of our world’s billionaires and the recent wins and losses, the likes of which the rest of us can only dream of.
(via Bloomberg and Vanity Fair)