The wealth of the 500 richest people in the world decreased by a total of $108 billion on Monday amid falling stock indices due to concerns over competition from the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, one of the biggest losers was Nvidia Corp., whose market capitalization plummeted by 18%, equivalent to a staggering $600 billion. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, lost $20.1 billion, or 20% of his fortune, marking the largest percentage loss among billionaires.
Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison experienced the largest absolute loss, amounting to $22.6 billion, or about 12% of his wealth. Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell saw his fortune shrink by $13 billion, while Zhao Changpeng from Binance lost $12.1 billion.
At the same time, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg became $4.3 billion richer in a single day, and Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com Inc. gained $632 million.
Overall, the tech sector accounted for 85% of the losses in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, totaling around $94 billion.
The Nasdaq Composite Index fell by 3.1% on Monday, while the S&P 500 dropped by 1.5%.
The Chinese startup DeepSeek has been developing AI models since 2023, but it gained notoriety only over the past weekend when its chatbot DeepSeek R1 topped the charts of the most downloaded applications in many countries. The company claimed to have spent only $5.6 million on its development, surprising investors and raising doubts about the justification for the multi-billion-dollar investments in similar projects by leading IT firms worldwide.
Meanwhile, Alexander Wang from Scale AI stated in an interview with CNBC last week that Chinese AI model developers likely have access to more advanced processors than many suspect, despite sales restrictions in China. This includes the latest Nvidia H100 graphics processors.
"As I understand it, DeepSeek has about 50,000 H100 processors, which they obviously cannot disclose due to the export restrictions imposed by the U.S.," he said.