South-African business mogul and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, is no longer the world’s richest man. This loss in position is reportedly a result of the sharp drop in the value of the shares of the electric car company, Tesla, earlier this year.
According to reports made by both Bloomberg and Forbes, Musk has been knocked out of his position by Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, a luxury goods group of companies. As of the time of writing, Elon Musk’s net worth is at around $178 billion as opposed to Bernard Arnault’s $188 billion net worth.
As to the cause of Mr. Musk’s recent woes experts have pointed fingers at numerous complaints by Tesla car owners over the quality of their cars, numerous reports of bugs in the car software, several failures of the Tesla car auto-drive system despite large amounts of cash sunken into its production as well as the not-so-smooth $44 billion takeover of Twitter earlier this year which left much legal and social discourse in its wake.
Dan Ives, a speaker from the investment firm Wedbush Securities all but swore that the “circus” surrounding the Twitter deal landed a huge blow on the Tesla share price. According to him, the event hurt Musk’s brand and this affected all other products associated with the former world’s richest man.