The coronavirus pandemic has turned many businesses upside down. As a result, a number of corporations suffered enormous losses, while their shareholders lost billions of dollars. This was caused by a plunge in the shares of those companies that had predicted a quick victory over the pandemic.
Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom Video Communications, suffered the most. On November 9, the video conferencing provider's shares on Nasdaq dropped by more than 17%. This had an extremely adverse impact on Yuan's fortune, which sank by $5 billion.
According to Bloomberg, Zoom shares took a hit after Pfizer and BioNTech had announced that their Covid-19 vaccine was 90% effective. Following the pharmaceutical giants' reports, their stocks surged, while key stock indices skyrocketed as well. The S&P 500, the US broad market index, hit an all-time high.
However, not all companies benefited from the news. A number of technology firms experienced a drop in share prices due to weaker demand for their services after quarantine restrictions were lifted. Apart from Zoom, stocks of such tech giants as Facebook (by 4.99%), Amazon (by 5.06%), FedEx (by 5.68%), and Netflix (by 8.59%) fell sharply.
As a result, the largest shareholders of these companies lost billions of dollars. For example, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott lost $8.94 billion and $3.27 billion, respectively. The stock market crash triggered by the vaccine news knocked $5.39 billion off the net profit of Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Fred Smith, the head of FedEx, reported a loss of $250 million, while Netflix CEO Reed Hastings saw his wealth decline by $416 million.
Forbes analysts estimated that the current financial losses of J. Bezos amounted to $9 billion, M. Zuckerberg - $5.3 billion, E. Yuan - $3.8 billion, M. Scott, the ex-wife of the Amazon founder, - $3.2 billion.
