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Stocks overcome free fall, finish the week in decline

American flags are seen on Wall Street outside the New York Stock Exchange in New York City. The Dow continued losses on Friday after a major stock sell-off that began Thursday. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
American flags are seen on Wall Street outside the New York Stock Exchange in New York City. The Dow continued losses on Friday after a major stock sell-off that began Thursday. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

Sept. 4 (UPI) -- U.S. blue chip stocks overcame a free fall at close Friday, but all three major stock indexes finished the week in decline.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened with new losses and was down 628 points at one point. It came back to finish the day down 159 points or 0.56%. The index tumbled by more than 800 points Thursday, its worst daily performance since June.

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The Dow declined 2.3% this week.

The S&P 500 closed down 28 points or 0.8% Friday and was down 1.8% for the week.

The Nasdaq Composite lost 145 points or 1.27% percent Friday and was down 3.27% for the week.

The downturn on Wall Street was led by mass tech sell-offs on Thursday that lost billions of dollars for the world's wealthiest 10 people, Bloomberg reported. Apple stock fell 8% Microsoft's 6.2% while Alphabet, Google's parent company, shed 5.1%.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lost about $9 billion and Tesla CEO Elon Musk $8.5 billion.

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer lost nearly $5 billion and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg $4.2 billion.

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The losses came after one of the best Augusts on Wall Street since the 1980s added billions to their combined net worth.

Both Musk and Zuckerberg last month became centibillionaires -- signifying hundreds of billions -- as they added several billion per day with growing values of Tesla and Facebook shares.

Even after Thursday's rout, the world's 500 richest people have so far added more than $800 billion to their fortunes this year amid the coronavirus pandemic. Bezos, the world's richest man, has added $83 billion to his wealth so far in 2020.

Earlier Friday, the Labor Department said the U.S. economy added 1.4 million jobs during the month of August, mostly in line with analysts' expectations.

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