Elon Musk no longer the world's richest man. Loses $15.2 billion after a tweet

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is no longer the world’s richest person after Tesla shares slid 8.6% on Monday. The fall of Tesla shares wiped out a whopping $15.2 billion from Musk's net worth. This has been the biggest decline in Tesla's value since September.

The decline was fueled partially by Musk’s tweet that the prices of Bitcoin and smaller rival Ether “do seem high." The tweet came two weeks after Tesla announced it added $1.5 billion in Bitcoin to its balance sheet.

That said, BTC & ETH do seem high lol

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2021

Musk has also confirmed via a tweet on Monday that Tesla's Model Y Standard Range SUV would still be available “off the menu," backing up reports from EV news site Electrek that the car had been discontinued from its online configurator.

Musk has dropped back to the second position on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a net worth of $183.4 billion which is down from a peak of $210 billion in January. On the other hand, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has reclaimed the top spot even after his fortune took a fall of $3.7 billion to $186.3 billion on Monday. Musk has been swapping the top spot with Bezos since January as the value of Tesla fluctuated.

Tesla's shares surged as much as 25% to start 2021 just to fall back again, wiping off almost all of this year’s gain. Musk also recently overtook Bezos for a brief period after rocket company SpaceX raised $850 million earlier this month. Bezos has maintained the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for three straight years prior to January.

(With inputs from Bloomberg)

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