Elon Musk on Thursday lost his trillionaire status for the second time in a month after a sharp fall in SpaceX and Tesla shares wiped $36.4 billion off his fortune in a single trading session.
According to Forbes, Musk’s net worth fell to $991.6 billion as of 1:30 pm EDT on October 8, slipping below the $1 trillion mark just three days after he regained it.
SpaceX shares dropped around 3.5% amid investor concerns over reports that the company plans to raise $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips. Tesla shares fell more than 2%, adding to the decline.
Musk first crossed the trillion-dollar threshold in June after SpaceX went public, briefly reaching an estimated fortune of $1.45 trillion.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison lost a combined $15 billion in wealth on Thursday, 8 October, as technology stocks tumbled, according to Forbes.
Huang’s estimated net worth fell by $6.1 billion to $199.3 billion, slipping below the $200 billion mark. Ellison lost $8.9 billion, taking his fortune to $176.8 billion, Forbes reported.
Now, Huang sits in No. 7 on Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list with an estimated net worth of $199.3 billion, having lost around 3% of his wealth on Thursday. Ellison holds the No. 8 spot, with an estimated net worth of $176.8 billion, down over 4.5% for the day.
In fact, they hold the No. 3 and No. 2 spots, respectively, on Forbes’ ranking of billionaires who lost the most for the day, coming behind Elon Musk, who lost over $30 billion, taking away his trillionaire status.
What triggered IT stock sell-off?
On Thursday, the Nasdaq 100 declined 1.4%, its worst one-day drop in seven weeks, while the S&P 500 Index fell 0.5%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 3.4% as Wall Street’s fear gauge, the Cboe Volatility Index, rose for the second day in a row.
A selloff in tech and AI-linked stocks deepened midday amid multiple bearish headlines. The Financial Times reported OpenAI’s annualized revenue is $20 billion less than previously signaled. Oracle Corp. slid following a report it was trucking natural gas to server farms as a workaround to power bottlenecks.
A barometer of smaller US firms avoided the worst of the selling, but the Russell 2000 Index is closing in on a 10% drop from its all-time high. The benchmark is also testing its 200-day moving average, a key technical level.
“My biggest surprise is the tech selloff remains concentrated, with more than two-thirds of S&P 500 constituents higher and small caps close to flat,” said Chris Murphy, co-head of derivatives strategy at Susquehanna International Group. “Strength in staples and low-volatility stocks points to rotation toward defensives rather than broad-based equity selling.”
(With inputs from Bloomberg and Forbes)