Monday’s maniacal trading led to huge losses around the world’s stock exchanges – and billionaires along with the common folk took big hits. Among the top losers? Jim Goodnight of SAS, whose fortune dwindled by $377.5 million, according to Bloomberg News’ estimates.
$1.8 TRILLION in household wealth vanished after the Dow plunged more than a thousand points in the opening minutes of trading and ended up down close to 600 points on the day.
Billionaires such as Goodnight (the No. 128 wealthiest man in the world as calculated by Bloomberg Billionaires) suffered immense hits in many cases. Goodnight took a 4.1 percent hit.
The news was even worse than the previous week when Goodnight lost $367.8 million last week as stocks turned south. The drop Monday beat that total, cutting the estimated fortune of the SAS chief executive officer and co-founder to $8.7 billion.
So far this year, Goodnight’s net worth has shrunk by more than 20 percent, or $2.3 billion.
Overall Monday, billionaires on the top 400 list as calculated daily by Bloomberg lost a whopping $124 billion.
Among them were 24 elites who lost ten figures – that’s billions – or more.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos lost 6.6 percent of his fortune, or $2.6 billion,
Bill Gates’ holdings fell $3.2 billion.
Tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Larry Ellison lost $1.2 billion or more.
So far this year, the richest were already “into the red” after losing $182 billion last week, Bloomberg noted.
Will there be more fortune shedding today?
For the latest update on the billionaires, read:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-24/the-world-s-richest-people-lost-another-124-billion-on-monday
For the latest calculations, see:
http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2015-08-24/cya
Goodnight still richer than on Forbes lists
As WTW noted Monday, despite the losses, Bloomberg’s estimates of Goodnight’s fortune is considerably higher than the better-known Forbes richest lists. Earlier this month, Forbes estimated Goodnight as being worth $7.8 billion, up from $7.5 billion in March.
Bloomberg doesn’t break down how it calculates Goodnight’s net worth. Making matters more challenging is that SAS is privately held, so Goodnight doesn’t have x-million of SAS shares valued at $xxx per share that would make for easy calculation.
Here’s Bloomberg’s latest boilerplate about Goodnight’s fortune:
“The majority of Goodnight’s fortune is derived from his 66 percent stake in SAS Institute. The world’s largest closely held software company had revenue of $3.1 billion in 2014, a 2.3 percent increase from the previous year, according to the company’s website. It doesn’t publish any other financial information.
“The valuation of SAS is based on the average enterprise value-to-Ebitda multiple of four publicly traded peers: Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and CA. A premium is applied, based on recent transactions in the software industry. This premium was lowered on March 23, 2015, to reflect the lower multiples more recent deals traded at.
“Goodnight probably has at least $200 million in cash and other investable assets, based on an analysis of dividends, taxes and market performance. That includes his Prestonwood Country Club in North Carolina, which features three 18-hole golf courses.”
