The breakout success of China’s DeepSeek has cost tech titans billions this year, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk leading the pack. The world’s richest person lost $90 billion, Fortune reported, and was followed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who reportedly lost $20 billion and $11 billion, respectively.
The billion-dollar AI startup’s rise to dominance hit Nvidia the hardest. It triggered a selloff in the AI chip-making company and caused its market value to drop by $600 billion. According to Bloomberg, it was one of the biggest drops of US stocks in the market’s history.
Moreover, at the beginning of February, Bloomberg estimated Musk’s net worth to be around $433 billion, but on February 28, it dropped to $349 billion. Within the same period, Zuckerberg’s net worth fell from $243 billion to $232 billion.
Oracle’s chief technology officer and billionaire Larry Ellison lost about $9 billion.
Collectively, DeepSeek wiped out $94 billion from the pockets of tech billionaires, Fortune reported.
Huang’s praise for DeepSeek: ‘Excellent innovation’
Despite the drastic fall in his personal fortune and that of his company caused by DeepSeek, in Nvidia’s most recent earnings call, Huang praised the Chinese startup and said it had “ignited global enthusiasm.”
“It’s an excellent innovation, but even more importantly, it has open-sourced a world-class reasoning AI model,” he said.
DeepSeek had debuted a large language model that could match those of rivals such as OpenAI for a fraction of the cost. But Nvidia’s major customers — Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — don’t seem deterred and are set to invest about $320 billion in AI and data center build-out, CNBC reported.
