Several notable billionaires experienced massive hits to their fortunes Monday as the Chinese generative artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek upended the U.S. stock market, hitting the American AI leader Nvidia the hardest.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at CES 2025.
As Nvidia shares tanked 16% and the company lost a record $500 billion-plus in market capitalization, the net worth of its CEO and biggest individual shareholder, Jensen Huang, dove, falling $19.8 billion by 12:45 p.m. EST.
Huang’s fortune slide from $124.4 billion to $104.6 billion knocked him from the 10th spot on Forbes’ real-time billionaires ranking to 17th, slipping behind Spanish fast fashion mogul Armancio Ortega, Walmart heirs Rob Walton, Jim Walton and Alice Walton, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Dell CEO Michael Dell and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Rivaling Huang’s drop Monday was a $24.9 billion loss for Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, knocking him behind Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the third-richest person on Earth, as Oracle stock tanked 13%.
Nvidia and Oracle were among several Big Tech losers Monday as DeepSeek’s large-language model that was reportedly developed for a fraction of its American competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT sent questions about whether companies will continue to spend lavishly on the technology necessary to power and train generative AI.
- Oracle chairman Larry Ellison (net worth down $24.9 billion)
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ($19.8 billion)
- Dell CEO Michael Dell ($12.4 billion)
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk ($5.3 billion)
- Google cofounder Larry Page ($4.9 billion)
- Google cofounder Sergey Brin ($4.6 billion)
- Early Google investor Andreas von Bechtolsheim ($4.6 billion)
- Interactive Brokers chairman Thomas Peterffy ($3.8 billion)
- Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ($3.7 billion)
- Broadcom chairman Henry Samueli ($3.7 billion)
Monday was largely a bad day for billionaires whose riches originate from Silicon Valley, but there were a few notable exceptions. Zuckerberg’s more than $2 billion bump Monday was the largest net worth gain of any American, as Meta shares rose 1% to a new all-time high ahead of its Wednesday earnings report. And the biggest tech stock winner was Apple, as the iPhone maker rose about 3%, boosting the fortune of its billionaire CEO Tim Cook by $19 million and the net worth of Laurene Powell Jobs, the philanthropist widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, by $237 million. Apple’s move against the broader market losses was likely a result of its less-intense AI spending push than its big-tech peers.
American stocks broadly struggled Monday, as the S&P 500 fell 2% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq slipped 3%, with much of the index losses stemming from Nvidia and other Big Tech companies’ nosedives. DeepSeek’s generative AI model rivaling OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini was trained on just $5.6 million worth of Nvidia’s graphics processing units, according to DeepSeek, a sum which the likes of Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon insist is a gross underestimate, though it opened the door for advanced AI using far less of the pricey technology sold by Nvidia. Other than the Nvidia-specific potential for less GPU sales as AI models advance, the DeepSeek drama also brought into question the high valuations enjoyed by America’s biggest companies stemming from the largely U.S.-centric generative AI revolution, which now features a major Chinese challenger in DeepSeek.