Unlike wealth, losses usually trickle down. When companies go bankrupt their employees loose their jobs. Millionaires actually love recessions, Jack Welch said:

Never miss out on an opportunity like a good recession.

The 2002 recession was not as global and universal as later ones. The dot com bubble mostly affected tech companies, and the internet was not as common as nowadays. I asked my parents once how they felt that recession, when I first read about it later, I was in school in 2002. They said they didnt even know there was a recession that time, in eastern europe it wasnt noticably worse than the chaos of the 90s

There is a simpsons episode about the bubble, s13e18, aired in 2002:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Furious_(Yellow)