Wall Street’s roller coaster ride of the past week has made even veteran investors a bit queasy. After months of calm, the market’s volatility, while not unusual in the historical sense, has resulted in some big short-term losses.
No one has felt this more than some of the country’s richest people. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett have substantial stock holdings in their companies—and while none are at risk for a lifestyle change after the past week, the yo-yoing, which has officially put us in correction territory, has impacted their bottom lines.
The entire stock portfolio of these billionaires is generally private information, but based on the public holdings in their own companies, here’s how the recent volatility has impacted some well known names.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon (AMZN) has held up fairly well amidst the market turbulence, only falling 3% between the market close on Feb. 1 and end of trading Thursday. But Bezos holds approximately 78.89 million shares of the company as of November 2017. That puts his losses at $3.1 billion.
Warren Buffett
Buffett has been giving away his Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) holdings for years, but as of Jan. 3 of this year, he still held 282,511 shares of Berkshire’s Class A stock. Those shares are down 12% over the past week, which has hit Buffett hard. His net worth has fallen $10.7 billion—more than the gross domestic product of the Bahamas.
Larry Ellison
Oracle (ORCL) is down 9% in the past week. Ellison owns an enormous stake in the company—over 1.1 billion shares as of December 2017. That puts his losses at just shy of $5.5 billion.
Bill Gates
Gates has been slowly selling off his shares of Microsoft (and actually owns less than Steve Ballmer does now), but as of Nov. 17, he still held around 102.9 million shares. Microsoft (MSFT) is down 10% in the past week, meaning Gates has seen a loss of about $952 million.
Mark Zuckerberg
The majority of Zuckerberg’s Facebook (FB) holdings are in its Class B stock (he owns nearly 411 million shares of it), which have 10 votes per share. That’s not traded on an exchange, so he has been shielded from seeing a big swing in that part of his portfolio. He does own just over 2.6 million Class A shares, though, which are the ones that Wall Street trades. With the company’s 11% dip in the past week, that’s cut his portfolio value by (a relatively paltry) $56.5 million.
