Tech billionaires lost almost 100bn in stock market selloff sparked by DeepSeek

DeepSeek's cut-price challenge to US AI dominance, which wiped 600bn in Nvidia's market value on Monday and caused the tech-weighted Nasdaq index to drop 3%, also took a bite out of the fortunes of some of the world's wealthiest men. Nvidia's record stock plunge, judged to be the biggest market value drop in US stock market history, according to Bloomberg, took with it 20.7bn of its CEO and biggest individual shareholder, Jensen Huang. The share-price drop left Huang, the company co-founder, with a net worth of 103.7bn late on Monday, down from 124.4bn. According to Forbes' real-time billionaires ranking, that pushes the 61-year-old tech tycoon from 10th to 17th place in global wealth rankings, behind Zara fashion mogul Amancio Ortega; Walmart heirs Rob, Jim and Alice Walton; Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates; Dell CEO Michael Dell; and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Exceeding Huang's paper losses from Monday's trading is cat rancher and Oracle chair Larry Ellison, who recorded a 27.6bn loss after shares in Oracle stock dropped 14%, knocking him down from third wealthiest man to fifth, behind Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and LVMH luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault.