(Reuters) -Twitter owner and Tesla boss Elon Musk briefly lost his title as the world's richest person on Wednesday, according to Forbes, following a steep drop in the value of his stake in the electric-car maker and a $44 billion bet on the social media firm.
Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury brand Louis Vuitton's parent company LVMH (EPA:LVMH), and his family briefly took the title as the world's richest, but were back at No. 2 with a personal wealth of $185.3 billion, according to Forbes.
Musk, who has held the top spot on the Forbes list since September 2021, has a net worth of $185.7 billion. Musk took over the title from Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos.
Tesla shares, which have lost more than 47% in value since Musk made his offer to buy Twitter earlier this year, were down 2.7%.
Musk's net worth dropped below $200 billion earlier on Nov. 8 as investors dumped Tesla's shares on worries the top executive and largest shareholder of the world's most valuable electric-vehicle maker is more preoccupied with Twitter.
Tesla has lost nearly half its market value and Musk's net worth has dropped by about $70 billion since he bid for Twitter in April. Musk closed the deal for Twitter in October with $13 billion in loans and a $33.5 billion equity commitment.
Besides Tesla, Musk also heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.