Top 10 Billionaires Who Lost the Most in the Tariff War

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump declared that the United States will impose a 10% flat tax on all nations worldwide, with higher rates applied to several of the country’s biggest trade partners, such asIndia, China, South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Global stock markets were rocked by the news on Thursday, with the tech-focused Nasdaq Composite closing down 6% and the S&P 500 average down 5%. Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan all saw declines in their stock markets.

The 3,000 billionaires in the entire globe lost $270 billion in total as a result of the defeat. The world’s wealthiest individuals, especially those who have recently sided with Trump, have been the largest losers thus far.

Nobody has been hurt more severely than Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Meta, whose wealth has dropped by $17.9 billion since the market for stocks closed yesterday due to a 9% decline in stocks in the parent organization of Facebook. After Meta contributed to Trump’s inauguration committees, Zuckerberg sat next to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk at Trump’s installation in January. Following that, he has visited with him at the White House many times, including the latest on Wednesday.

Are you currently the second-biggest loser? After Amazon donated to Trump’s inaugural group, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, who has recently attempted to get closer to Trump, sat in the second seat beside the sitting president at his inauguration in January. He declared in February that the Washington Post, which he purchased for $250 million in 2013, will shift its editorial pages to emphasize free markets and individual liberty. In a piece of opinion published on X a month later, he expressed his thoughts on tariffs, stating that the pages will discuss “the harmful and misleading effects if penalties are employed to pick champions and losers.” On Thursday, Bezos was down $16 billion after Amazon’s stock fell 9%.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, has lost $9.9 billion as a result of a 6% decline in Oracle shares. (He also owns a sizable portion in Tesla.) Ellison has been for years a significant Conservative supporter, in contrast to Bezos and Zuckerberg. He sponsored a Trump event in 2020 and had dinner with the president at his Palm Beach resort Mar-A-Lago last year. Joining OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, he joined President Donald Trump in January to make a $500 billion investment in AI data centers in the United States.

Donald Trump’s right-hand man at the Bureau of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, the wealthiest individual in the world, is also suffering. With the stock of Tesla down more than 5% following a difficult week in which the car manufacturer said its sales had fallen by 13% in the first three months of the year, he has lost $8.7 billion, the fifth-highest amount among billionaires in monetary terms.

As stocks in his company LVMH fell by about 6%, French luxury magnate Bernard Arnault, who was the richest person in the entire world until last year, lost $8.6 billion. In January, Arnault publicly showed his support for Trump by going to the inaugural ceremony with two of his five children, all of whom work as executives at LVMH. In addition to Bezos and Zuckerberg, a number of other industry titans suffered significant losses, such as Michael Dell, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co founders of Google.

Today, at least five millionaires have completely disappeared from the ranks. Gary Friedman, the CEO of RH (previously Restoration Hardware), has lost the most money in percentage terms. His net worth has decreased by 37% to around $730 million. Friedman’s riches have been wiped out by a 40% decline in shares of the high-end furniture company. The garment business, which might potentially be severely impacted by tariffs, is where other dropouts built their riches. The United States is the world’s greatest importer of clothes, sourcing the majority of it from Asia, including 21% from China and 18% from Vietnam.

Therefore, it should come as unexpected that the Hong Kong-based garment maker Crystal Worldwide Group’s co-founders, Kenneth and Yvonne Lo, have also seen their company’s shares drop by 23%, bringing its total value below $1 billion. For 38% of its 2024 sales, Crystal, a clothing manufacturer for brands which includes Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Nike, Adidas, and Puma, was dependent on North America. As the shares of the Vancouver-based female clothing boutique Aritzia plummeted by 20%, Brian Hill, the company’s founder, additionally witnessed his net worth drop below $1 billion.

Read More: Donald Trump’s “Reciprocal” Tariffs: Global Impact and Economic Consequences

And how is the President doing in the midst of the market turmoil? Not too awful. As shareholders drove the price of Trump Media & Technology Group Corporation, the parent organization of the president’s social media platform Truth Social, down 3%, compared to the market’s decrease, the president’s net worth dropped by $40 million to $4.6 billion.