Key Notes
- The world’s 500 richest people lost $185 billion on November 5, the 14th-largest daily decline in Bloomberg’s ranking since 2012.
- Musk lost $79.7 billion and Huang fell out of the top 10, while Dell, Ellison and other technology fortunes also shrank.
- The roughly $1 trillion lost by Magnificent Seven shares overlaps with personal wealth changes and should not be added to the billionaire total.
The world’s 500 richest people lost a combined $185 billion on Thursday as a technology-stock rout cut deeply into the fortunes built around artificial intelligence, cloud computing and electric vehicles. Elon Musk suffered the largest individual decline, while Jensen Huang fell out of the global top 10.
The November 5 decline was the 14th-largest one-day loss since Bloomberg began its wealth ranking in 2012, Bloomberg reported. Separately, the Magnificent Seven shed roughly $1 trillion in stock-market value, illustrating how heavily the selloff hit the companies behind some of the largest personal fortunes.
The losses below refer to the same Thursday snapshot of the wealth index. They measure changes in estimated net worth, rather than money withdrawn from bank accounts or cash lost through disclosed share sales.
Musk, Dell and Huang Lead the Losses
Elon Musk: $79.7 billion lost. His exposure spans SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) and Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA), giving him unusually large exposure to changes in investors’ expectations for AI infrastructure, autonomy and robotics. The stakes that previously restored his trillionaire status during a rally can produce equally dramatic reversals when those shares fall.
Michael Dell: $19.4 billion lost. The founder of Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) was another major casualty. His company supplies servers and enterprise computing equipment, placing its business directly in the path of investment decisions by customers building AI infrastructure.
Jensen Huang: $15.1 billion lost. The Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) co-founder’s fortune fell to $150.9 billion, moving him from ninth to 13th in Bloomberg’s ranking. Nvidia’s role as a central supplier of AI processors has made Huang one of the clearest personal beneficiaries of the computing boom—and exposed his fortune to sharp reversals in the chipmaker’s shares.
Larry Ellison: $10.1 billion lost. The co-founder of Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) sits on another side of the same trade: supplying cloud computing capacity to businesses running AI systems. A reassessment of future data-center demand can therefore reach beyond chipmakers to the companies financing and operating the infrastructure.
Other Technology Fortunes Also Shrink
The declines extended to founders and former executives whose wealth is tied to advertising, online retail and business software. These companies serve different customers, but their shareholders have also been weighing the scale and prospective returns of AI investment.
- Mark Zuckerberg: $8.41 billion lost. The co-founder of Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) has built his fortune around Facebook, Instagram and the advertising business that helps finance the company’s AI expansion.
- Steve Ballmer: $6.29 billion lost. The former Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) chief executive retained a large shareholding in the software group. Microsoft’s business stretches from workplace applications to Azure’s cloud-computing business.
- Jeff Bezos: $4.99 billion lost. The founder of Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) is linked to both consumer spending through the retailer and corporate technology budgets through Amazon Web Services.
- Larry Page: $4.24 billion lost. The Google co-founder’s wealth is closely connected to Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL), whose search, advertising and cloud businesses face both the costs and commercial opportunities of AI.
- Sergey Brin: $3.88 billion lost. Google’s other co-founder shares exposure to the same corporate parent. His separate fortune means a fall in Alphabet can produce multibillion-dollar personal losses for both founders on the same day.
A Trillion-Dollar Hit to the Magnificent Seven
The approximately $1 trillion decline in the Magnificent Seven was a company-valuation measure. An estimate compiled by NDTV Profit put Nvidia at the center of the group’s losses.
That figure covers the value of shares held by all investors in those seven companies, including pension funds, investment funds and individual shareholders. The billionaire figures cover each person’s estimated assets and liabilities. Adding the two totals would count some of the same share-price losses twice.
The groups also have different boundaries. SpaceX, Oracle and Dell Technologies are outside the Magnificent Seven, even though their founders were among the people most affected by Thursday’s retreat. A rich-list loss is therefore not a simple allocation of the seven companies’ market-value decline.
AI Expectations Drive a Wider Repricing
The broader market selloff left the S&P 500 down 4.36% and the Nasdaq 100 down 6.36% at Thursday’s close. Investors were reassessing AI spending and the possibility that tighter rules on data-center construction could slow expansion.
Those concerns connect otherwise different businesses. A delayed computing project can mean fewer orders for chips and servers, slower growth for a cloud provider and a longer wait for returns on money already committed. Markets can mark down those expected earnings before a company reports an actual reduction in sales.
Large founder holdings magnify that repricing. Musk’s $79.7 billion decline was more than five times Huang’s $15.1 billion loss, even though both were caught in the same selloff. The scale of a fortune—and the assets behind it—can matter as much as the percentage move on the stock screen.
