Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang loses $15 billion in a day and falls to 13th on the rich list

Jensen Huang‘s slide down the rich list is the least surprising part of this week’s chip rout, and the most useful. AI stocks had been falling for weeks in a way that rarely made front pages. It took a ranking of the world’s wealthiest people to make that slide visible to everyone else.

The Nvidia chief executive remains one of the richest people alive. What changed is the read on the money behind his fortune. Most of it sits in a single company, and that company’s revenue depends on a short list of data-center buyers who now lean on stock and bond markets to keep spending. When that money gets harder to raise, his ranking is simply where the bill shows up first.

What the Bloomberg index recorded

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Huang’s net worth fell by $15.1 billion on Thursday to $150.9 billion, pushing him down four places, from ninth to 13th. Nvidia shares closed at $181.60 in New York, down 9.3% from $200.13 the day before. It was the stock’s steepest one-day fall since January 2025, and Seoul Economic Daily reports it was enough to erase Nvidia’s gains for the year.

He had company. The 500 people on the index lost $185 billion between them, the 14th-largest one-day drop since the ranking began in 2012. Elon Musk lost $79.7 billion as Tesla and SpaceX fell, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison lost $10.1 billion as Oracle dropped 6.9%. The three men accounted for more than half of the day’s losses.

The bear market almost nobody was naming

The headline number arrived late. Reuters reported that the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell as much as 11% during the session, its worst performance since March 2020, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped as much as 5%, enough to confirm a correction after its record close on October 6. Advanced Micro Devices, Sandisk, Micron, Dell and Marvell were among more than a dozen large technology stocks down by double digits.

Several reports ran the day’s sharpest line under Huang’s name, but it belongs to a fund manager. Adam Sarhan, chief executive of 50 Park Investments in New York, told Reuters: “AI stocks are already in a private bear market that virtually nobody is talking about. If you look at the semiconductor index, it’s down about 31% from its 52-week high. The point is that many AI-related stocks are already deep into bear market territory, and very few people are discussing it.” Sarhan added that large companies such as Apple are cutting back on AI spending because they are not seeing enough return on it.

Why Huang’s fortune is really a financing story

Most coverage stopped at the rank. The more telling detail is where Nvidia’s money comes from. Most of its revenue now comes from data-center operators, with Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta among them, and most of Huang’s wealth comes from his Nvidia stake, which he trims through regular, prearranged share sales. His net worth works as a running estimate of how long those buyers keep writing cheques.

Those cheques increasingly depend on outside money. Reuters noted that selling in stock and bond markets has reduced access to financing for many companies in the data-center build-out, while new local limits on construction add another brake. Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank, told the agency that free cash flow at the hyperscalers is falling and that they are issuing more equity and more bonds to pay for AI, both of which weigh on valuations. Oracle raised $20 billion this week through new stock and bonds for its own data-center push, and Ellison’s fortune has roughly halved over the past year.

Panic or repricing

Not everyone reads Thursday as a turning point. Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide, pointed to weak results from Qualcomm and Arm and to “very aggressive institutional selling and de-leveraging by hedge funds”, and called it “an emotional sell-off.” Peter Andersen, founder of Andersen Capital Management, called the sell-off unwarranted. Huang has also been here before this year: he dropped out of the top ten in February, when a Walmart rally lifted the Walton family above him, and then climbed back.

That history is the case for calm, and it is also the point. Technology billionaires hold 36% of the wealth on the index and had been on course for their best year on record, which is exactly why one bad session for a single industry’s spending plans can move the whole table.

Whether Huang returns to the top ten will depend less on anything Nvidia announces than on what it costs his biggest customers to keep paying for his chips.

Tags: Elon Musk, nvidia, Jensen Huang, semiconductors, Larry Ellison