The year 2022 is turning out to be a bad year for world’s richest billionaires including Tesla and SpaceX boss, Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive Officer of Meta, as they have seen their fortunes take massive hits with their wealth dropping to as much as a combined $1.4 trillion.

Bloomberg reports that Musk alone has seen his fortune plunging by almost $62 billion while Bezos saw his wealth tumble by about $63 billion, just as Zuckerberg’s net worth dropped by more than half.

The Bloomberg report also noted that the world’s 500 richest people lost the whopping $1.4 trillion in the first half of 2022 alone which marked the steepest six-month drop ever for the global billionaire class, while there are fears that the volatility could continue in the second half of the year.

The decline is a sharp departure from the previous two years, when the fortunes of the ultra-rich swelled as governments and central banks unleashed unprecedented stimulus measures in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, juicing the value of everything from tech companies to cryptocurrencies, the report stated.

Musk still has the biggest fortune on the planet at $208.5 billion, while Amazon’s Bezos is second with a $129.6 billion net worth, with Bernard Arnault, France’s richest person, ranked third with a $128.7 billion fortune, followed by Bill Gates with $114.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Changpeng Zhao, the crypto pioneer who debuted on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in January with an estimated fortune of $96 billion, has seen his wealth tumble by almost $80 billion this year amid the turmoil in digital assets.

At the start of the year, only four billionaires were worth more than $100 billion with 10 people worldwide exceeding that amount, including Zuckerberg, who is now 17th on the wealth list with $60 billion, the report said.