Major Art Collectors Lose Billions as Tech Shares Fall

Three of the world’s richest people—Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Bernard Arnault, all of whom are also notable art collectors—lost more than $130 million each at the end of last week amid a stock selloff that sent tech shares plummeting.

Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his net worth drop by $15.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. And Ellison, head of software giant Oracle Corp, saw his net worth fall by $4.4 billion.

Arnault, head of luxury conglomerate LVMH, lost $1.2 billion earlier this week. The change puts his net worth at $182 billion, totaling $25 billion in losses this year, according to Bloomberg.

The losses were prompted by a 3 percent drop last week in the Nasdaq 100 Index, which measures the value of thousands of stocks listed on the the Nasdaq stock exchange. Meanwhile, a US jobs report on Friday showed that hiring has slowed and that unemployment was a three-year high.

Arnault and Ellison both oversee their own namesake museums, while Bezos has been reported to collect a few high-value contemporary artists more discretely. They have all appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list.

Generally, when their wealthy peers have faced similar losses, it has done little to impact their philanthropy and collecting. In 2015, when heirs to the Walmart fortune lost more than $40 billion of their combined net worth after the retailer company’s shares fell by 30 percent, Alice Walton, the 19th richest person in the world, continued acquiring works for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which she opened four years earlier. She even divested from a ranching business to keep the museum’s initiatives growing the same year.