When it comes to the world’s richest billionaires, tech founders litter the top of the list. AI has been heralded as a multitrillion-dollar industry, catapulting many founders to extreme wealth; but now AI bubble fears and doubts over valuations have led to billions erased from CEOs’ net worth overnight. For Larry Ellison, whose net worth has been hardest hit, that looks like a $59.2 billion loss since the year started—and we’re only in February.
After months of eyebrow-raising over software stocks and AI’s impact on the sector, a selloff on Tuesday triggered the loss of billions among the wealthiest. In the few days since then, Ellison has watched his wealth slide by $19 billion, according to current data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. While Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s fortune has dropped by $14 billion.
The Tuesday selloff, turbocharged by Anthropic’s 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 from the net worth of the industry’s wealthiest entrepreneurs so far this year, according to a Bloomberg analysis of its Billionaires Index.
