Billionaire Fortunes Dive As Tech Stocks Plummet-And Nvidia Responds

Topline
The release of a less capital-intensive artificial intelligence model from China’s DeepSeek sent a chill through the U.S. stock market Monday, initiating a massive selloff and hitting billionaires where it hurts—their fortunes.
Monday was a brutal day for American big tech stocks. Getty Images
Timeline
Nvidia releases its first statement on DeepSeek as its stock dipped to a 18% loss on the day, calling the Chinese company’s model “an excellent AI advancement” — the full statement from a Nvidia spokesperson is as follows: “DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling. DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant. Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking. We now have three scaling laws: pre-training and post-training, which continue, and new test-time scaling.” David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s “AI & Crypto Czar,” offers his first comments on DeepSeek, saying the Chinese company’s success “shows that the AI race will be very competitive” and “we can’t be complacent,” supporting Trump’s repeal of former President Joe Biden’s executive order placing guardrails on AI development, which Sacks said “hamstrung” U.S. AI innovation. Oracle chairman Larry Ellison (down $24.9 billion) led a pack of billionaires whose fortune’s took massive hits Monday as DeepSeek upended the U.S. stock market, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ($19.8 billion), Dell CEO Michael Dell ($12.4 billion), Tesla CEO Elon Musk ($5.3 billion) and Google cofounder Larry Page ($4.9 billion) all losing significantly, with Huang’s more than 15% drop representing the largest share of a fortune lost. U.S. stocks got walloped Monday: The S&P 500 was down about 1.8% at 12:30 p.m. EST, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq sank 3.4%, heading toward its worst percentage loss since Dec. 18 and fourth-worst day of the last two years. Shares of Nvidia plunged 15% by 11:15 a.m. EST, heading toward its worst daily percentage loss since March 2020, when stocks briefly crashed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and potentially becoming the single greatest single-day loss in terms of market cap of any company in history. Broadcom had slipped 16% as of 11:30 a.m. Domestic leaders in AI showed stinging losses at market open Monday as Microsoft dropped 4% and Tesla slipped 2%, with semiconductor chip architect Nvidia diving 12% and other big chip stocks like Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company falling more than 10% apiece. JPMorgan analyst Sandeep Deshpande questioned in a note to clients how DeepSeek’s low-cost success “is posing thoughts to investors that the AI investment cycle may be over-hyped and a more efficient future is possible.” Referring to the Magnificent 7 set of trillion-dollar U.S. companies including Nvidia and Tesla accounting for much of the 2020s bull market, Yardeni Research founder Ed Yardeni noted a “competitive threat to their magnificence has emerged from China.” Billionaire investor Marc Andreessen called DeepSeek’s R1 model