Elon Musk loses world’s richest person tag: One tweet on Bitcoin costs him $15 billion

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has lost his top spot of being the richest man on the planet after the shares in Tesla dipped to 8.6%, wiping $15.2 billion from his net worth.

Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos has regained his numero uno position after losing it to Musk, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

This is touted to be the biggest decline since September and the primary reason behind this fall is fuelled by Musk's comments over the weekend that the prices of Bitcoin and smaller rival Ether "do seem high." This came two weeks after Tesla announced it added $1.5 billion in Bitcoin to its balance sheet which eventually led to a surge of more than 400% over the past year.

Shares in Tesla were set to plunge into the red for the year on Tuesday, hit by a broad selloff of high-flying technology stocks and the fall of bitcoin. Tesla was down over 6% in U.S. premarket deals after an 8.5% drop during the previous session.

Musk had also tweeted that the company's Model Y Standard Range SUV would still be available "off the menu," backing up reports from electric vehicle news site Electrek that the model had been removed from its online configurator.

As per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the Tesla chief executive officer's wealth rose to $199.9 billion after the rocket company he founded completed another funding round. Musk’s space startup, SpaceX, raised $850 million in fresh funding this month from a group of investors led by Sequoia Capital.