Not since 2020 amid the panic caused by Covid-19 has Wall Street fallen so deep, as on Friday, April 4, after China announced it was retaliating against the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump. The S&P 500 index, representing major US companies, dropped down 6%, while the Nasdaq, rich in technology stocks, lost 5.8%. Over two days, both indexes fell by more than 10%. Since the peak following Trump's election, they have lost 17.5% and 22.5%, respectively. Traders believe that beyond 20%, we enter a long-term bear market.

In total, more than $6 trillion in valuation disappeared in two days. The "Magnificent Seven" (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia) lost, on their own, $1.8 trillion in market capitalization. The correction hit tech moguls and is a source of ridicule. According to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) had lost, by Thursday evening and since the beginning of the year, $110 billion, $37 billion, and $18 billion, respectively. Only the cautious investor Warren Buffett, who had begun liquidating his shares, notably his Apple shares, during 2024, saw his fortune increase by $23 billion. "One of these men did not attend [Trump's] inauguration ceremony," quipped Harvard economist Jason Furman on X, mocking the tech tycoons' allegiance to Trump.

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