If you have reached the level of being a billionaire, just remember that the government and people will be on your back watching on both your success and your mistakes. Other rivals will want to predate on your gains by focusing on your weaknesses. This is how top billionaires Elon Musk and Isabela Dos Santos lost their money by 1st January 2023. Just how does it feel to lose 1 billion dollars in a day and still breath is a lesson we should learn from.
From the two wealthy persons losses, we learn the importance of investing in good relations, constant monitoring of the market trends, profits and loss and most importantly, humility at your greatest.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the first man in history to go at a loss of 200 billion dollars in wealth. The CEO of Tesla, Space X and Twitter is worth a whopping $137 billion dollars. By this he comes second place behind Bernard Arnault who is now the richest man in the world. But at its peak in November 2021, Musk’s net worth was $340 billion dollars.
Due to this, Elon becomes first ever person to lose such a huge fortune of $200 billion dollars in wealth
Tesla which is the source of Elon Musks huge fraction of wealth had its stock plunge 65% in 2022. The demand for Tesla weakened as competition in electric vehicles rose. The company even had to scale back production in China.
By last month statistics showed that car buyers had started to lose interest in Tesla. Many people now question whether Tesla was ever worth the trillion-dollar company it was reported to be.
Elon Musk’s recent $44 billion purchase of twitter hasn’t helped Tesla’s stock or rather his personal wealth. Musk’s largest shareholder has sold $23 billion worth of Teslas shares since his interest in Twitter rose as compared to Tesla’s.
His constant tweeting on the platform and his controversial behavior has vexed Tesla investors who want Musk to pay more attention to his larger company.
Isabel Dos Santos
The Supreme Court of Angola recently ordered a preventive seizure of assets worth $1 billion Dollars which belonged to the daughter of the former President of Angola, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos. This was a request from Angola’s Public Ministry
Isabel Dos Santos, the 1st female billionaire in Africa often referred to as ‘Princess’ is under investigation for embezzlement of state funds, money laundering and influence peddling. She denied the charges and termed them as politically induced.
She has been in a legal battle with the Angolan Government since 2018 for corruption.
On Monday, November 28th, 2022, Angola the Angola press agency reported that the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) in Angola issued an international arrest warrant against Isabel Dos Santos with Interpol.
49 -year -old Isabel is the eldest child of Jose Eduardo Dos Santos and was the public face of the Dos Santos business network and was appointed the Head of the state oil firm in June 2016.
Could she have used her position and father’s influence to gain massive wealth? Could it be a reason she is doubted? But again, to grow such wealth it takes the person talent and management expertise. She might just be good at it and envied by rivals connected to the government of the day. Politically induced as she claims.
She was among the family members appointed by their late father to head key government positions and was later removed in November 2017 by the new Angolan President who succeeded her father.
Isabel was in Forbes’ 2020 billionaire list as Africa’s richest woman with wealth valued above 1.4 billion. However, she dropped on the list after her assets were confiscated in Angola, Portugal and The Netherlands.
According to the Forbes, between 2007 and 2010, at least $32 billion of oil revenue went missing from the federal ledger, according to the International Monetary Fund, which later tracked most of the money to ‘quasi-fiscal operations. It was against this backdrop that Isabel Dos Santos became Africa’s richest woman, worth $3.7 billion by 2014. Her empire began to fall after her father retired from office.
Sources: Reuters and Face to face Africa
By Denzel S. Ondijo
