Billionaire wealth — on paper, at least — has tumbled dramatically during Wall Street’s recent turmoil, illustrating important lessons for everyone about the ephemerality of stock gains and losses.
Why it matters: Net worth is something of a public obsession, and a bit of a chimera avidly followed by publications like Bloomberg or Forbes. Yet the stark reality about paper wealth – especially fortunes tied to volatile technology stocks – is that it can be ephemeral, and attempts to put an exact figure on it can be misleading.
