Even as Elon Musk continues to lay off employees at Twitter, he has once again claimed his title as the world’s richest person, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Earlier in December last year, Louis Vuitton CEO Bernard Arnault had taken over the top rank from Tesla and Twitter CEO, and Elon Musk slipped to the second spot for more than two months. A Bloomberg report said that a surge in Tesla stock helped Musk take back the top position of the Billionaires Index.
As of Monday, Elon Musk’s net worth was around $187.1 billion which is higher than Bernard Arnault’s $185.3 billion fortune. This was made possible due to a 70 per cent increase in Tesla’s stock price this year, which is almost 100 per cent higher than its intraday low on January 6. Elon Musk’s net worth fell by over $200 billion between November and December, courtesy the fall in value of Tesla shares. This was due to investors’ apprehensions around the Covid effects in China and also Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Amid all this, Musk is making cost cuts at Twitter which he acquired for $44 billion last year. He had, in November, tweeted saying that the microblogging site was losing nearly $4 million a day. He has laid off at least 200 of Twitter’s workforce or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 employees this weekend. Among the employees who were asked to leave was Elon Musk aide Esther Crawford who was the new Twitter Blue head and also the Chief Executive of Twitter Payments. According to reports, Esther Crawford was terminated because of the lacklustre response to Twitter Blue.
Before this, he had fired dozens of employees across sales and engineering departments at the firm. This is despite his promise, in November 2022, to his employees, wherein he had said that layoffs were over, after terminating roughly two-third of the workforce in just a few weeks.