- Billionaires were getting $10 billion richer every day in January. Just one month later, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg have lost a combined total of $138 billion.
This January felt like the honeymoon period for billionaires, who saw their wealth surge by $10 billion every day. One month later, the daydream is over, and their net worth is tanking.
Throughout the month of January, it’s estimated that the world’s richest people saw their fortune swell by $314 billion—a figure that’s about the collective salary of 15 million workers. But for many billionaire businessmen, from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison, that high didn’t last. Their gains are already slipping away.
The Bloomberg Billionaire Index is heaving with numbers in the negatives—all of the world’s richest technology, consumer, and industrial leaders are being hit hard.
At the beginning of February, Musk’s net worth rested around $433 billion; today, that number is $349 billion. Meta CEO Zuckerberg slipped from $243 billion to $232 billion in the same time period, and Larry Ellison lost about $9 billion.
Tech billionaires in particular—who make up many of the world’s richest people—are watching their wealth take a tumble. It follows DeepSeek’s breakout success. The Chinese tech underdog rocked the market, startling competitors like Meta and spurring praise from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. DeepSeek’s revolutionary, low-cost R1 model has wiped billions off the stock market.
DeepSeek’s explosive rise, wiping almost $100 billion in wealth
DeepSeek triggered a tsunami throughout the AI industry, and CEOs are caught up in the tidal wave.
The billion-dollar AI company’s rise to dominance hit Nvidia the hardest—Jensen Huang witnessed $600 billion in his company’s market value vanish. Bloomberg noted it as one of the biggest drops of U.S. stocks in the market’s history, as DeepSeek products triggered a selloff in Nvidia. Huang himself lost over $20 billion, dropping to a net worth of $103 billion. It triggered a domino effect across the 1%.
Collectively, it’s estimated DeepSeek wiped a total of $94 billion from the pockets of the world’s richest people: tech leaders. Chairman Ellison recorded a personal loss of $27.6 billion—dropping from third- to fifth-richest person in the world—after Oracle’s stock plummeted 14%. Michael Dell also lost a cool $12.4 billion from the Nvidia sell-off, alongside Musk bleeding $5.3 billion, Google founder Larry Page’s net worth dropping $6.3 billion, and Google investor Andreas von Bechtolsheim suffering a $5.4 billion crash.
While these numbers are eye-watering to the average person, for the wealthiest few it represented a small dent in their wealth. Even though Elon Musk—the world’s richest man—has lost nearly $90 billion this year, he still takes the throne of global net worth. And the leaders most implicated in this crash still keep their chin up; Huang might have a bone to pick for his personal and company losses, but in Nvidia’s most recent earnings call, he praised DeepSeek.
“It’s an excellent innovation, but even more importantly, it has open-sourced a world-class reasoning AI model,” Huang said, adding that DeepSeek has “ignited global enthusiasm.”
Read more from Fortune