$1,400 Billion went Up in Smoke

Last year the world had 1,125 billionaires. Today there are 793. How $1.4 trillion vanished.

It was hard to avoid the carnage, whether you were in stocks, commodities, real estate or currencies. Even people running fine businesses could have been killed by frozen credit markets, weak consumer spending or fraud.

"It's going to get worse," says David Geffen, who watched his net worth fall 25% to $4.5 billion as real estate and art prices softened. "I don't think we've hit the bottom. It wouldn't surprise me if the Dow fell below 6000. Unemployment is now 8.1%, which means it's really 13.1% after you add 5% for part-time workers and people who are no longer on the employment rolls. I think it will reach 15% or 16% by the end of the year."

The biggest loser in the world this year, by dollars, was last year's biggest gainer. India's Anil Ambani lost $31.9 billion--76% of his fortune--as shares of his Reliance Communications, Reliance Power and Reliance Capital all collapsed. Ambani is one of 24 Indian billionaires, all but one of whom are poorer than a year ago. Another 29 Indians lost their billionaire status entirely. India's stock market has fallen 44% in a year, global equity prices 39%.

Donald Trump, we estimate, has seen nearly half of his net worth disappear. His casino company is in bankruptcy--again. His $1 billion hotel and condo tower in Chicago hasn't closed enough previously agreed-to sales and can't find new buyers. Evidently having some difficulty making timely repayments of $640 million in unguaranteed construction loans from Deutsche Bank, he sued the lender last fall (but recently took the lawsuit off the table). As cranes stand idle above half-built residential real estate projects around the world, Trump's ability to profit from licensing his name and marketing expertise to other developers has become impossible to gauge--despite his popularity. "We're not going down; we're going up," says Trump. "We're buying things we couldn't have dreamed of buying two years ago. And we have a lot of cash."

The Donald always makes a few shrewd moves. Last May Trump sold a Palm Beach, Fla. house to Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev, who was worth $12.8 billion last year, for $100 million. In the months that followed, shares of the new homeowner's publicly traded fertilizer outfit, Uralkali, cratered, erasing three-quarters of his fortune. Trump dumped some of the cash he made into a few golf courses put on the block by their cash-strapped owners.

Rybolovlev was one of the lucky Russians who kept their billionaire status. Russia became the epicenter of the world's commodities bust, dropping 55 billionaires. Among them: Dmitry Pumpyansky, an industrialist from the resource-rich Ural mountain region, who lost $5 billion as shares of his pipe producer, TMK, sank 84%.

Last year Moscow overtook New York as the billionaire capital of the world, with 74 tycoons to New York's 71. Today there are 27 in Moscow and 55 in New York.

As credit froze, commodities spoiled and manufacturing stalled, some of last year's biggest gainers suffered the largest losses this year.

Anil Ambani added $24 billion between 2007 and 2008, only to give back $32 billion. Warren Buffett's $10 billion bump in 2008 won him the heavyweight title in 2008. Today he is one of five people to have dropped $25 billion or more, and slips to second place.

The ten biggest dollar losers lost a combined $238 billion in the past year, more than the GDP of Ireland or Israel. Still, these tycoons are worth a combined $175 billion, and half of them are still among the ten richest people on the planet.