That drop leaves their combined wealth at $4.7 trillion, so we are of course still talking about massively wealthy individuals with more money than could ever be spent in any given number of lifetimes. But the back half of 2018 has still been a rough economic period, with a combination of stock market selloffs wiping out all the gains made in the first half of the year. Of all those billionaires, it was Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who saw the biggest single loss, perhaps not a surprise given the social media platform’s steady stream of PR nightmares in 2018. His fortune saw a total of $23 billion slough off throughout the year. Katie Nixon is the chief investment officer at Northern Trust Wealth Management, and for Bloomberg she summed up how investors feel about the market at the tail end of the year: “As of late, investor anxiety has run high… We do not expect a recession, but we are mindful of the downside risks to global growth.” Hopefully for everyone’s sake, the financial fortunes of the world’s richest people are not in fact an indication that a recession is on the way.
