Billionaires on the brink: How the Forbes400 makes and loses billions during market crashes
Fortunes are often forged, or fumbled away, in the fire of economic downturns. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to sweep the world in early 2020, the wealth of U.S. billionaires plummeted in lockstep with the stock market.
As a huge wave of consumers around the globe joined the internet, rabid investors hoping to get in on the tech boom poured funds into wildly unprofitable startups promising to change the world. The S&P 500 hit a record high in March 2000. Then the bubble began to burst, sending the S&P down 50% over the next two and a half years. Jeff Bezos began an April 2001 letter to Amazon shareholders with a single word: “Ouch.
. “I didn’t learn anything. I already knew that I wasn’t supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basketcase and I couldn’t help myself.”He got rich selling internet radio company Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in cash and stock in 1999—near the top of the dot-com bubble. Then he made an even smarter move, using collars to protect his Yahoo stock from a price drop, which soon came when the shares plummeted 90% in 2000.The investor who helped build Oppenheimer & Co.
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