The richest 500 people on the globe added $852 billion to their wealth in the first half of 2023, according to a statistics report from the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.
Musk was the biggest winner, collecting an extra $96.6 billion.
Hindenburg’s targets Adani and Icahn have experienced the sharpest drops.
The index, which debuted in March 2012, is a daily rating of the world’s 500 richest persons based on their net worth. According to Bloomberg, which originally revealed the year-to-date wealth grows, the numbers are updated at the end of each trading day.
Over the last six months, each member of the club earned an average of $14 million every day, according to the site.
Bloomberg claimed that the period was the strongest six months for the ultra-rich since the second half of 2020, when the economy began to recover from the financial impact of COVID-19.
Elon Musk at the top, Bernard Arnault and Jeff Bezos follow!
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the owner of Twitter, leads the billionaire group with a net worth of $247 billion as of Wednesday morning.
In the first half of 2023, Musk’s net worth increased the most.
In the last six months, the world’s richest individual added $96.6 billion.
Second place goes to French business magnate Bernard Arnault, who is worth $199 billion. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos came in third place with $155 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, ranks ninth with $104 billion, behind Musk by $143 billion.
Gautam Adani’s net worth dropped the highest in the last six months, losing $60.2 billion. Adani, the head of Adani Group, also suffered the worst one-day loss of any billionaire, losing almost $20.8 billion on Jan. 27, when short seller Hindenburg Research accused his conglomerate of accounting fraud and stock manipulation, which Adani disputes.
Nate Anderson’s Hindenburg also reduced the net worth of another billionaire, Carl Icahn. His Icahn Enterprises LP saw its worst one-day decline after Hindenburg reported that it was shorting the company, claiming that it was excessively undervalued in comparison to its holdings. Icahn’s net worth dropped $13.4 billion, or 57%, the most of any member of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index during the time.