In early February, Mark Zuckerberg added $28 billion to his wealth in a matter of hours as Meta’s shares soared after the company announced its first dividend payout.
This follows a banner year for the Facebook founder, who saw his wealth surge 173% in 2023. Like Zuckerberg, many tech billionaires added huge sums to their wealth as the stock market rebounded.
This graphic, from Preyash Shah, shows the biggest winners and losers in billionaire wealth in 2023.
I do not have to read the article to know that the biggest losers are everyone else.
Eh. In these kinds of articles, the story is less “rich seize more wealth from others” than it is “assets already held by rich increase in ‘value’”. Almost everything in this article is “stock price go up” and, therefore, the somewhat imaginary “wealth” number of anyone holding that stock goes up. Basically, the headline could be “changes in stock price make the notional wealth of billionaires fluctuate”. Sort of a non-story to me, because everyone listed in this article could have done absolutely nothing all year, and these numbers would have changed regardless. More interesting (if only slightly) would be an article about changes to their actual assets (i.e. did they increase or decrease shares in their company, etc.). I don’t really get the “let’s keep score” for billionaires thing the media does in any case, but this article is on the more useless end of that useless pursuit.
