Amancio Ortega’s Net Worth On Forbes Loses To Bill Gates Again – Jeff Bezos Also Hit By U.S. Stock Market Dip

My, oh my, how fickle wealth can be these days. Amancio Ortega’s net worth briefly beat out Bill Gates for the title of the world’s richest man, but this temporary victory was lost in less than a day after the Inditex stock dipped, stealing away all that money.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth is largely tied to the success of the online retail giant. The quick rise of the Amazon stock caused the 51-year-old founder of Amazon to suddenly surge in wealth, taking him from the 13th-richest man in America all the way up to third place, briefly ranking him behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

But, as Amancio Ortega also found out, when your wealth is tied to a stock price then Wall Street can take away that wealth just as quickly as it came. Now that the week’s stock trading sessions in America are over, the Forbes real-time charts for the world’s billionaires shows that Bezos has dropped back all the way to fifth place, placing him solidly above Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the Koch brothers with a net worth of $52.8 billion.

Not exactly riches to rags, but this type of thing is actually a fairly common occurrence. Investor Warren Buffett knows this very well, since almost exactly a year ago he lost $1.5 billion of his net worth in a single day. What is worse, that October week had Buffett bleeding cash even further.

“Warren Buffett’s $1.5 billion loss happened due to IBM posting disappointing earnings on Monday. Then on Tuesday Coca-Cola posted bad news as well, and the two company’s drops resulted in some big losses for the Berkshire Hathaway CEO,” an older report from the Inquisitr explains. “The drop in IBM stock price resulted in a $1.06 billion loss Monday for Buffett, and an additional decline on Tuesday stole another $494 million from the investment guru’s pocket. The Coca-Cola drop is said to have resulted in Buffett losing another $1.09 billion on Tuesday alone.”

Similarly, Amancio Ortega’s net worth is now $78 billion after the Inditex stock price took a beating in the latter half of Friday. Ortega’s wealth hit a brief peak of $80 billion stock in his holding company Industria de Diseño Textil reached an all-time high of 33.99 Euros per share. Industria de Diseño Textil, or Inditex, is the parent company to popular fashion brands like Zara, Pull&Bear and Massimo Dutti. According to Forbes, it is also quite notable that Ortega managed to overcome Bill Gates’ net worth during this time period, “since Forbes measures fortunes in dollars, and the value of the Euro has fallen from $1.27 a year ago to $1.10 today.”

Forbes is already predicting that Amancio Ortega and Bill Gates will be swapping the title for the world’s richest man back and forth over the next week or so since there’s only a $1.4 billion difference between the two. Historically, this prediction is very likely, and some may be surprised to hear that Gates has not always retained his title as the world’s richest man.

Back in 2014, Gates’ net worth dipped down to $76 billion, making room on the charts for other men and women. Ortega was in the No. 3 spot at the time, but Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu was once was the richest man in the world. He’s now worth $62.5 billion, but he experienced his major dip in wealth because Mexico’s government passed a bill to prevent him from becoming a monopoly. So, yes, both the stock market and governments can be very fickle if you are a billionaire.

Bill Gates briefly relinquished his title as the world’s richest man to Amancio Ortega: https://t.co/TtCygoVtp1 pic.twitter.com/NWV4Ebp78m

— Forbes (@Forbes) October 23, 2015

[Photo By Xurxo Lobato / Getty Images]