The founders of Tencent and ByteDance experienced a significant drop in wealth at the start of 2024 while Indonesia’s Pangestu saw his net worth climb almost 1000 percent.
Last year was a double-edged sword for many of the world’s richest billionaires. Although many in the big-tech-founder crowd saw their riches being propelled higher by a strong equities rally at the end of the year, it didn’t help everyone.
China's ultra-high net worth smartphone set couldn't benefit from the same frothy ladling of generative AI euphoria and the grease of expected interest rate cuts, particularly in the US. Key exponents saw significant drops in their net worth, a Visual Capitalist ranking of the biggest winners and losers in 2023 that cited «Forbes» data indicated (as of December 31, 2023).
TikTok and Tencent
Zhang Yiming, who founded ByteDance, best known for the quasi-universal TikTok social media app, saw his wealth drop by 12 percent to 43.4 billion US dollars.
He was joined by Ma Huateng, co-founder and CEO of Tencent, who saw his net worth drop by slightly less than 10 percent to $34 billion.
Magnificent Seven
That is quite some contrast to the fate of some of the key luminaries of the so-called «Magnificent Seven» in the Americas, and whose combined heft now takes almost a third of the US S&P 500 index’s weighting.
Elon Musk saw his wealth practically double (up 83 percent) by $113.5 billion to rise to $250.4 billion, part of the gain likely coming from a certain little 2022 hiccup with a social media company trying hard to become known as X.
Dividends in View
The Zuck, a new self-ordained preacher of quarterly dividend virtue, saw his Facebook-distilled wealth rise a gob-smattering 173 percent to $123.6 billion.
They weren’t the only big tech luminaries to see strong rises in their net worth. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his wealth rise 60 percent to $174.4 billion. Others of that ilk who showed strong gains included Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (both up almost half), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), and Jensen Huang (Nvidia).
Extreme Movement
Still, despite that, the largest fluctuations, at least in percentage terms, were in Asia.
Indonesian timber and oil magnate Prajogo Pangestu, the richest individual in Southeast Asia, saw his wealth rise an eye-watering 971 percent to $54.5 billion. Much of that came from an October 2023 IPO of his Barito Renewables geothermal power company.
On the other end of the scale, India’s Gautam Adani, of Hindenburg short-selling fame, saw his wealth almost cut in half, dropping $56.5 billion to 69.7 billion.
Truth in Numbers
At this point, it might be the facile thing to say that numbers don’t lie. But the larger truth, when it comes to such rankings, is that they neither hide any larger truths or twisted facts, at least not all that much.
What they do show more or less precisely is how prevailing trends are affecting the wealthy of this world. And they do that in a reasonably granular fashion.
