The American markets were spooked by the DeepSeek AI storm on Monday, January 27. While Dow Jones closed in green with minor gains, the tech-heavy Nasdaq closed with colossal losses of 612.47 points, or 3.07 per cent of its total value.
The S&P 500 also shed 1.46 per cent or 88.96 points of its value.
The DeepSeek Debacle
The AI system, which topped Apple's iPhone App Store of AI applications, is said to be able to perform the same tasks as OpenAI's ChatGPT with far fewer chips (like the ones produced by Nvidia) and much lesser data (used in training the models).
Jensen Huang |
This appears to have affected the fortunes of American tech and particularly AI-giants. This in turn has affected the personal fortunes of many billionaires who have their stakes in the business.
Larry Ellison Loses Over USD 20 billion
First up, Nvidia, which was one of the biggest casualties yesterday, also saw its founder-CEO Jensen Huang lose about USD 20 billion or about 16.74 per cent from his net worth, taking Huang's overall net worth to USD 103.6 billion.
However, Huang was not the biggest loser. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who was last seen with US President Donald Trump, signing an all-important USD 500 billion AI infrastructure deal saw one of the biggest decline in personal wealth.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who was last seen with US President Donald Trump, signing an all-important USD 500 billion AI infrastructure deal |
The 80-year-old lost a monumental USD 27.6 billion or 12.12 per cent of his net worth. This took Ellison to the 5th position on the Forbes list of richest people with a total net worth of USD 200 billion.
Some of the other stakeholders in this AI business, and key figures of those companies also suffered. Alphabet, Google's parent company, which is heavily invested in AI also took the heat.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page |
The company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, saw their net worth decline by USD 6.4 billion and USD 6 billion respectively. Their overall net worth(s) dipped to USD 151.1 billion and USD 148.1 billion respectively.
In addition, SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son also saw his net worth slip to USD 31.2 billion, after a depreciation of USD 3.8 billion or about 10.73 per cent of his net worth.
.jpg)
