Elon Musk Is About to Lose His Spot as World’s Wealthiest Man

It’s not like he’ll have trouble paying his cable bill, but Elon Musk is in danger of losing his rank as the number one wealthiest man in the world — on one list, anyway.

CNN reported Wednesday afternoon that Musk slipped behind Louis Vuitton (LVMH) CEO Bernard Arnault on the Forbes Billionaire list. However, the Twitter owner’s slip in the rankings didn’t last long; Musk’s wealth soon ticked back up to $184.9 billion, compared to Arnault’s $184.7 billion.

Arnault has maintained a place near the top of the list thanks to his company’s stock remaining relatively stable throughout 2022. A great deal of Musk’s fortune is in Tesla shares, which have plummeted by more than 55%. Forbes speculated that this was partly because of Musk’s controversial Twitter acquisition.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, using a total of nearly $20 billion in profits from Tesla shares sold at different times throughout the year. As CNN notes, however, it isn’t all that easy to figure out just how much money Elon Musk has in the bank:

Estimating Musk’s wealth, in general, is a difficult task, however, as much of his money is tied up in his private companies, including rocket and internet firm SpaceX, tunneling outfit The Boring Company, and Neuralink, which wants to put computer chips in people’s brains.

The Forbes list is one thing — as CNN notes, Musk easily tops the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which lists his worth as $179 billion, with Arnault holding down a distant second place at $165 billion.