Five Big Tech bosses have taken a nearly $200 billion blow to their combined net worth this year as AI buzz eases and the US and Israel’s war with Iran continues to spook investors.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder and tech chief, has seen his personal fortune shrink by about $60 billion since the start of January, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows.
Ellison was worth $188 billion at Friday’s close, well off a peak of nearly $400 billion in September last year, when he briefly dethroned Elon Musk as the world’s richest person.
His sharp wealth drop has been fueled by a nearly 30% plunge in Oracle’s stock price this year, as investors have soured on the enterprise-software giant’s debt-fueled buildout of AI data centers.
Meta cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a $46 billion hit to his wealth this year, reducing it to $187 billion at Friday’s close.
Shares of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp’s parent company have tumbled 20% this year as the social-media giant fends off lawsuits and faces mounting skepticism over its massive AI spending plans.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are down about $31 billion, $32 billion, and $29 billion year to date.
Shares of the e-commerce behemoth and the search-and-advertising titan are down around 14% and 12% each this year, as investors have pared their bets on blue-sky AI growth projections.
Broad losses
These five men alone have seen a combined $198 billion erased from their net worths this year. Other big names in business are deep in the red too: former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is down $41 billion this year at $128 billion as of Friday’s close, reflecting a 26% slump in the enterprise-software group’s stock price.
Outside of tech, LVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault has seen his wealth wiped out by almost $58 billion this year, driven by a 29% tumble in the luxury giant’s stock.
World stocks have broadly sold off in recent weeks as the Iran conflict has thrown financial markets into disarray.
The virtual closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route for global flows of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), has spiked crude prices, heaped fresh pressure on consumers, eroded growth forecasts, reignited inflation fears, and dashed hopes for rapid interest-rate cuts in several countries.
Page, Bezos, Brin, Ellison, Zuckerberg, and Arnault rank second to seventh on Bloomberg’s rich list, in that order. Musk still tops the ranking with a $17 billion gain this year to $637 billion. That reflects the soaring valuations of his private businesses, such as SpaceX and xAI, as Tesla stock is down 20% this year.
Huge excitement about AI and its potential to supercharge productivity and multiply corporate profits have driven tech stocks to new highs in recent years.
But skeptics such as Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame have warned that the buzz has created a bubble characterized by nosebleed valuations, overbuilding, and circular dealmaking that will end badly.
