{"id":456203,"date":"2026-02-08T10:37:40","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T10:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/456203\/"},"modified":"2026-02-08T10:37:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T10:37:40","slug":"larry-ellison-and-jeff-bezos-have-seen-more-than-66-billion-swiped-from-their-net-worths-since-the-start-of-this-year-as-ai-driven-slump-sees-tech-billionaires-wealth-free-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/456203\/","title":{"rendered":"Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos have seen more than $66 billion swiped from their net worths since the start of this year as AI-driven slump sees tech billionaires\u2019 wealth free-fall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When it comes to the world\u2019s richest billionaires, tech founders litter the top of the list. AI has been heralded as a multitrillion-dollar<\/a> industry, catapulting many founders to extreme wealth<\/a>; but now AI bubble fears and doubts over valuations have led to billions erased from CEOs\u2019 net worth overnight. For Larry Ellison<\/a>, whose net worth has been hardest hit, that looks like a $59.2 billion loss since the year started\u2014and we\u2019re only in February.<\/p>\n

After months of eyebrow-raising over software stocks and AI\u2019s impact on the sector, a selloff on Tuesday<\/a> triggered the loss of billions among the wealthiest. In the few days since then, Ellison<\/a> has watched his wealth slide by $19 billion, according to current data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index<\/a>.\u00a0While Amazon<\/a> founder Jeff Bezos\u2019s<\/a> fortune has dropped by $14 billion.<\/p>\n

The Tuesday selloff, turbocharged by<\/a> Anthropic\u2019s new legal AI tool, also sent the already dwindling fortunes of software billionaires to tumble even harder. Following the broad selloff that saw the S&P 500 software and services index fall by nearly 4%, at least $62 billion was wiped<\/a> from the net worth of the industry\u2019s wealthiest entrepreneurs so far this year, according to a Bloomberg analysis of its Billionaires Index<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the three founders of advertising platform<\/a> AppLovin<\/a> saw the biggest relative decline in wealth in the aftermath in the selloff; CEO Adam Foroughi lost 31% of his net worth since the start of the year, around $7.8 billion, while former CTO John Krystynak\u2019s fortune was shaved down 30% after a $2.4 billion blow. Fellow AppLovin<\/a> cofounder Andrew Karam also emerged from the selloff 29% less rich than at the start of 2026.<\/p>\n

Despite building the world\u2019s most valuable company thanks to AI advancements, Nvidia<\/a> CEO Jensen Huang has also faced a decline; he\u2019s lost $7 billion since the selloff earlier this week, and is down nearly $12 billion this year. And the net worth of Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft<\/a>, has gone through the wringer this week. Relative to his peers, he\u2019s only lost a modest $5 billion after Tuesday\u2014but since the start of 2026, almost $29 billion has been wiped from Ballmer\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

Technology has proved a gold rush, with the industry minting new entrepreneurial millionaires and billionaires yearly. Take a look at the top 10 richest U.S. billionaires, who added a whopping $698 billion<\/a> to their net worth between 2024 and 2025, according to a 2025 Oxfam report<\/a>, and the sector\u2019s financial power comes to light.<\/p>\n

Story Continues <\/p>\n

Most of the top 10 wealthiest Americans are the poster children of the tech industry, including Oracle<\/a> cofounder Larry Ellison, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google<\/a> cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meta<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, ex\u2013Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and Dell founder Michael Dell. Each of them gained nearly $70 billion last year\u2014833,631 times what the typical American household takes home.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s wealthiest have managed to tap into tech as the industry is still rapidly growing\u2014but fast-evolving promises also leave the door open for AI bubble concerns. \u201cSecond thoughts\u201d can lead to rapid multibillion-dollar losses.<\/p>\n

No one knows this better than Oracle cofounder Ellison himself.<\/p>\n

Briefly last year, the 81-year-old entrepreneur dethroned Tesla<\/a> CEO Elon Musk as the richest person in the world. Ellison, who owns 40% of Oracle, had experienced an eye-watering $101 billion wealth surge overnight following his business\u2019s breakout earnings report that sent shares soaring by 36%.<\/p>\n

But the high was short-lived<\/a>; Ellison\u2019s estimated net worth fell by $34 billion just two days following Oracle\u2019s stock surge, while Musk enjoyed a $35 billion gain, putting him back on top. Ellison\u2019s loss was triggered by \u201csecond thoughts\u201d around the company\u2019s cloud deal with OpenAI, J. Bradford DeLong, a UC Berkeley economist, told Fortune<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

A rapidly expanding AI market also enables new, fierce competitors to throw vast fortunes into disarray.<\/p>\n

In January of last year, billionaires saw their wealth surge by $10 billion<\/a> every day. But just one month later, the honeymoon period was over; during February 2025, Musk\u2019s net worth dropped from $433 billion to $349 billion. Meta CEO Zuckerberg slipped from $243 billion to $232 billion in the same period, and Larry Ellison lost about $9 billion. The reason why? Chinese tech underdog DeepSeek rocked the market with its low-cost R1 model, wiping billions off the stock market, with $600 billion vanishing from Nvidia\u2019s market value alone.<\/p>\n

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it comes to the world\u2019s richest billionaires, tech founders litter the top of the list. AI has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":456204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,13652,159598,213251,69141,13445,213253,172,74,213252],"class_list":["post-456203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-billionaires","tag-bloomberg-billionaires-index","tag-extreme-wealth","tag-larry-ellison","tag-net-worth","tag-selloff","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-worlds-richest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}