When You’re Rich, a Bad Market Day is a REALLY Bad Day
When the financial markets have a rough spell, it certainly concerns me. A long bear market might jeopordize my job, it might affect the value of my house, and it even shows on the bottom line of my meager 401k and Etrade accounts. However, when you don’t have a lot of money, you can’t loose a lot of money. I can look at a day like today, when the markets were down around 3.5%, with interest and awe instead of nervousness and fear.
I don’t know what it’s like to have a million dollars, let alone hundreds of millions, but I can only imagine that no one enjoys seeing wealth evaporate as it did today, with the fear that it could possibly get worse.
So I present to you the following table of some high profile executives and how much paper wealth they lost today. I understand these are just meaningless numbers, however I can only imagine that there are quite a few financially well-off folks out there sweating a major market correction like we saw just six years ago. During the DotCom boom and bust, countless individuals watched their wildest dreams come true as they ammassed a fortune in stock options, only to see those fortunes disappear before they exercised them.
|
Executive |
Company |
Stock Change on 2/27 |
Shares |
Total Lost |
| Bill Gates | Microsoft | ($1.20) | 922,924,402 | $1,107,509,282.40 |
| Larry Ellison | Oracle | ($0.53) | 1,217,871,324 | $645,471,801.72 |
| Jeff Bezos | Amazon.com | ($2.05) | 101,198,359 | $207,456,635.95 |
| Jerry Yang | Yahoo.com | ($1.17) | 42,990,579 | $50,298,977.43 |
| Marc Benioff | Salesforce.com | ($1.90) | 18,431,006 | $35,018,911.40 |
| Steve Jobs | Apple | ($4.72) | 5,426,451 | $25,612,848.72 |
