Elon Musk's fortune has fallen by roughly $612B since 16 June, a month in which the value attached to his name shrank by more than Jeff Bezos and Larry Page have built between them across five decades of Amazon and Google. Nobody handed that money to anyone else. It existed as a number on a screen, and the screen changed.
Forbes valued Musk at $1.45 trillion on 16 June, when SpaceX shares peaked at $225.64 and briefly made him the first person on record worth more than a trillion dollars. By Thursday evening the same tracker put him at $838.1B, still comfortably the richest man alive, ahead of Page at $290.3B, Sergey Brin at $267.8B, and Bezos at $258.9B. Add the last two together and the total, $549B, still falls short of what Musk's paper wealth shed in a month.
