Something that would have been absolutely unthinkable 12 months ago just happened. At 10:05 am PST on December 13, 2022, Elon Musk lost his position as the world’s richest person. He has been overtaken by LVMH founder Bernard Arnault. With a net worth of $168 billion, Bernard Arnault is now the world’s richest person for the first time in his life. His fortune is $3 billion greater than Elon Musk’s current $165 billion net worth.

Why would this have been unthinkable just one year ago? At this time last December, Elon Musk’s net worth was $300 billion. At that level he was the richest person in the world be a margin of $110 billion. The second richest person in the world wasn’t Bernard Arnault. It was Jeff Bezos. Back then Bernard was worth $150 billion and Jeff was worth $190 billion.

Elon was the first person in history to achieve a net worth that topped $300 billion without adjusting for inflation. And his net worth had actually reached an all-time high of $340 billion just a month earlier, on November 4. When his fortune hit $340 billion (which only lasted a day or two) Elon Musk became the richest human in modern history, overtaking John D. Rockefeller’s inflation-adjusted wealth record that stood for over 80 years.

As this was all going on, some very smart people thought $300 billion was just the first stop towards a much MUCH larger fortune. The valuations of Elon’s two main companies, Tesla and SpaceX were soaring. The stock market as a whole was ripping to all time…