• Eight tech titans have taken a $266 billion blow to their collective wealth this year.
• Their combined net worth fell by $64 billion on Monday as the Nasdaq had its worst day since 2022.
• Elon Musk has had $132 billion, or 30% of his fortune, erased in 2025 following Tesla's stock slide.

Eight tech billionaires have seen their combined fortunes shrink by an estimated $266 billion this year as President Donald Trump's policies continue to spook investors.

That figure exceeds the market value of most of America's largest companies including Salesforce, McDonald's, and Wells Fargo.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk leads the list of wealth losers, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The world's richest person has had $132 billion, or 30% of his fortune, wiped out in the past 10 weeks following the 45% slide in Tesla stock in that period.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Dell Technologies' Michael Dell, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang have each seen more than $20 billion erased from their respective net worths this year as their companies' stock prices have tumbled. Amazon and Oracle are both down about 11%, while Dell and Nvidia have slumped by north of 20%.

Rounding out the group are Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — down about $18 billion and $17 billion each this year following a 12% drop in shares of Google's parent company —and Steve Ballmer, who's down about $13 billion after a 10% decline in Microsoft stock.

The eight tech titans' collective net worth fell by $64 billion on Monday alone as the Nasdaq Composite slid 4%, its steepest one-day loss since 2022.

The sell-off was sparked by Trump cautioning there would be a "period of transition" for the US economy in a Fox News interview on Sunday.

The president didn't rule out a recession when asked if he expected one this year. He said his focus was on strengthening America and achieving long-term prosperity: "You can't really watch the stock market."

Trump's sweeping economic agenda is focused on equalizing US trade relations using tariffs, curtailing immigration, lifting regulations, cutting taxes, and downsizing the federal government. His policies have reignited inflation fears and stoked recession worries.

The increased uncertainty has dampened the buzz around AI that had lifted tech stocks and the wider market to record highs this year. One consequence is the world's 16 wealthiest people are worth $236 billion less than they were at the start of January after a $87 billion decline on Monday, per Bloomberg's rich list.

Microsoft's Bill Gates and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg were still up between $4 billion and $5 billion for the year at Monday's close. The Facebook cofounder took a $9.5 billion wealth hit on the day — second only to Musk's $29 billion blow.

Three others on the list are in the green for 2025 as they're less exposed to tech: Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett is up about $14 billion, while LVMH's Bernard Arnault and Inditex's Amancio Ortega are up between $6 billion and $7 billion.

The richest of the rich shouldn't feel too sorry for themselves, as they had a stellar 2024. The top 10 billionaires at the end of December were up more than $500 billion for the year, and worth a combined $2 trillion — about as much as Amazon or Alphabet.

• Michael Burry stayed quiet, bet big on Chinese tech giants, and saw one stock wager pay off in 2024.
• The investor of "The Big Short" fame boosted his Alibaba and JD.com stakes and bought into Baidu.
• The RealReal stock has surged more than sevenfold since Burry invested in early 2023.

Michael Burry kept a low profile, plowed money into three Chinese tech giants, and saw a long-standing stock bet pay off in 2024.

Who is Michael Burry?

Burry is best known for predicting and profiting from the collapse of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. His contrarian wager was immortalized in the book and film "The Big Short."

He's also famous in financial circles for predicting market crashes and recessions, investing in GameStop long before the video-game retailer became a meme stock. He also bet against Elon Musk's Tesla, Cathie Wood's flagship Ark fund, Apple, a microchip fund containing Nvidia, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indexes in recent years.

Burry goes by Cassandra B.C. on X — a nod to the priestess in Greek mythology who was cursed to utter true prophecies but never to be believed.

Staying quiet

In years past, Burry frequently shared his thoughts on the markets, economy, and other subjects using X.

For example, he warned of the "greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things" in the summer of 2021, and told buyers of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that they were careening toward the "mother of all crashes."

Burry even caught Musk's attention with the Tesla and SpaceX CEO calling him a "broken clock" in late 2021. Moreover, the investor set alarm bells ringing on Wall Street in early 2023 with a one-word post: "Sell."

However, Burry didn't post at all last year, and hasn't shared anything with the 1.4 million followers of his primary account since April 2023.

Chinese trio

Burry's Scion Asset Management revealed in a first-quarter portfolio update it had boosted its bets on Alibaba and JD.com, two Chinese e-commerce titans. It also established a small position in Baidu, a search giant that's been dubbed the "Chinese Google."

The Scion chief added to both the Alibaba and Baidu positions in the second quarter while paring his JD.com stake, but then ramped up all three wagers in the third quarter.

In the 12 months to September 2024, Scion quadrupled both its Alibaba and JD.com stakes. It went from owning 50,000 Alibaba shares worth $4.4 million to 200,000 shares worth $21.2 million.

It raised its JD.com position from 125,000 shares worth $3.6 million to 500,000 worth $20 million. Starting from scratch, it also amassed 125,000 Baidu shares worth $13.2 million in the nine months to September.

Those three stocks accounted for 65% of the total $83 million value of Scion's portfolio, excluding options, at the end of September. Burry hedged his highly concentrated portfolio by purchasing put options against the three stocks with a notional value of $47 million in the third quarter.

Burry, a value investor who hunts for bargains, may have pounced on the trio because he views them as undervalued. Chinese stocks have been hit by regulatory threats, concerns about the country's slowing economy and real estate crisis, rising geopolitical jitters, and skepticism about the government's stimulus plans.

It's worth pointing out that quarterly portfolio filings only paint a partial picture of an investor's holdings. They exclude shares sold short, private investments, foreign-listed stocks, and non-stock assets like bonds and real estate. They're also only a snapshot of the portfolio on a single day in a three-month period.

Patience pays off

Apart from Alibaba and JD.com, the only stock that Scion held onto for all of 2024 was The RealReal, an online luxury goods marketplace.

The stock has featured in Scion's portfolio since the first quarter of 2023, when the firm owned about 684,000 shares worth about $862,000, or $1.26 each.

Scion still owned 500,000 shares at the end of September, worth nearly $1.6 million at that time. The stock has jumped from a little over $3 then to $8.73 at Wednesday's close.

The upshot is Burry has likely made several times his money on The RealReal, especially if he was still holding the stock when it surged last quarter.

• Warren Buffett has long recommended a low-fee S&P 500 tracker fund to amateur investors.
• Chamath Palihapitiya says it's become riskier as a handful of stocks now dominate the index.
• Buffett mostly steers clear of tech names but Apple has been his no.1 stock for years.

Warren Buffett preaches that picking stocks and timing the market are fool's errands for the vast majority of people. He says their best bet is to simply invest in a low-fee S&P 500 index fund and hold it for the long term.

But a handful of technology stocks have become so incredibly valuable that owning the market capitalization-weighted S&P 500 is basically a concentrated bet on those risky businesses, not a wager on the stock market as a whole, Chamath Palihapitiya says.

"This needs to be fixed or it will end in disaster," the venture capitalist and cohost of the "All-In" podcast said in an X post on Saturday. He was reacting to a chart shared by Kevin Gordon, a senior investment strategist at Charles Schwab, which showed the 10 most valuable S&P 500 companies accounted for 39.9% of the benchmark index's total market cap on December 20.

Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, Berkshire Hathaway, and Walmart are worth around $21 trillion together — a big chunk of the S&P 500's roughly $50 trillion market cap.

"Average Americans buy S&P 500 index ETFs, in part, because Buffett told them to," Palihapitiya said. "They were told they would pay very little and get diversification in the 500 best companies on earth to ride out storms."

But the Social Capital CEO and early Facebook investor said the outsize weighting of a few stocks means that "when you buy an index of 500 companies, you're really buying 10 companies with 490 others thrown in."

Palihapitiya said the lack of diversification means that if Big Tech stocks take a hit, investors could suffer huge losses as the pain to their portfolios won't be tempered much by other holdings. Amateur buyers face a "rude awakening if this isn't addressed," he added.

It's worth noting that Palihapitiya has been widely criticized for promoting high-risk special purpose acquisition deals (SPACs) during the pandemic and showing little remorse when their value cratered.

Buffett, a value investor who strives to remain within his circle of competence, has largely eschewed tech stocks throughout his career as they tend to be expensive and he lacks expert knowledge of what they do.

Yet he's counted Apple as Berkshire's largest position by far for the better part of a decade, despite paring that wager in recent quarters. The famed investor and Berkshire CEO has also hailed Alphabet and Meta as extraordinary businesses.

On the other hand, Berkshire is extremely diversified, owning scores of businesses including Geico, See's Candies, and Pilot Travel Centers. It also holds billion-dollar stakes in listed companies such as Coca-Cola and Bank of America.

Buffett has previously shrugged off shareholders' concerns about his stock portfolio being overly concentrated in Apple. But he might feel less comfortable now than in the past with amateur investors buying an index that's so dominated by a few Big Tech names.

• Elon Musk is almost $200 billion richer than Jeff Bezos and worth more than Costco.
• His net worth hit $447 billion after Tesla stock jumped and SpaceX's valuation rose to $350 billion.
• Just five years ago, Musk was worth about $25 billion, and Tesla was valued below $100 billion.

Elon Musk is nearly $200 billion richer than Jeff Bezos, and personally worth more than Costco, after adding $63 billion to his fortune in a single day.

His net worth surged to $447 billion on Wednesday, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after Tesla stock jumped 6% and SpaceX's valuation leaped to $350 billion based on employee share sales.

Musk's fortune has ballooned by $218 billion this year — a sum that exceeds the net worth of every other person on the rich list except Amazon's Bezos ($249 billion) and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg ($224 billion).

Musk is now more than twice as wealthy as Oracle's Larry Ellison ($198 billion), and more than three times as rich as Warren Buffett ($144 billion).

His one-day gain — the largest in the index's history — rivals the total wealth of Binance cofounder Changpeng Zhao, ranked 23rd with a $63.2 billion fortune. It also helped to lift the combined wealth of the 500 richest people on the planet to above $10 trillion for the first time, Bloomberg said.

Musk is now worth more on paper than the vast majority of US public companies, including Costco ($442 billion), Home Depot ($419 billion), and Netflix ($400 billion).

His wealth is largely made up of his roughly 13% stake and some contested stock options in Tesla, and his 42% slice of SpaceX. Musk's other businesses include xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and X Corp, formerly Twitter.

Tesla shares have surged more than 70% this year to $425 at Wednesday's close, valuing the company at nearly $1.4 trillion. That figure comfortably exceeds the roughly $1 trillion market value of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and approaches the $1.6 trillion value of Zuckerberg's Meta.

The electric vehicle maker's shares have soared as investors bet it will harness artificial intelligence in revolutionary products such as self-driving cars and humanoid robots.

Musk's prominent role in Donald Trump's campaign, and his emergence as a close advisor to the president-elect who's tasked him with streamlining the US government, have also fueled optimism around his companies.

SpaceX is now valued at $350 billion based on the latest price paid by the company and its backers to buy shares from employees, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The Starlink owner's valuation was previously $210 billion after a secondary share sale in June.

It's worth underscoring how dramatic Musk's wealth jump has been. He was worth less than $170 billion as recently as April, and only about $25 billion five years ago — around 1/18 of his net worth now.

Tesla was worth less than $100 billion during the Covid crash of 2020, or about 1/14 of its valuation today.

• Oracle shares are set for their best year since 1999 after a 75% surge.
• The enterprise-computing stock has benefited from strong demand for cloud and AI infrastructure.
• Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison's personal fortune has surged .

Oracle has surged 75% since January, putting the stock on track for its best year since a tripling in 1999 during the dot-com boom.

The enterprise-computing giant's share price has jumped from a low of about $60 in late 2022 to about $180, boosting Oracle's market value from below $165 billion to north of $500 billion.

It's now worth almost as much as Exxon Mobil ($518 billion), and more valuable than Mastercard ($489 billion), Costco ($431 billion), or Netflix ($379 billion).

Oracle's soaring stock price has boosted the net worth of Larry Ellison, who cofounded the company and is chief technology officer. His holding of more than 40% puts him second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list worth $227 billion, second only to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $330 billion.

Oracle provides all manner of software and hardware for businesses, but its cloud applications and infrastructure are fueling its growth as companies such as Tesla that are training large language models pay up for processing power.

The company was founded in 1977 but is still growing at a good clip. Net income jumped by 23% to $10.5 billion in the year ended May, fueled by 12% sales growth in the cloud services and license support division, which generated nearly 75% of its revenues.

Oracle signed the largest sales contracts in its history last year as it tapped into "enormous demand" for training LLMs, CEO Safra Catz said in the fourth-quarter earnings release. She said the client list included OpenAI and its flagship ChatGPT model, which kickstarted the AI boom.

Catz also predicted revenue growth would accelerate from 6% to double digits this financial year. That's partly because Oracle is working with Microsoft and Google to interconnect their respective clouds, which Ellison said would help to "turbocharge our cloud database growth."

Oracle has flown under the radar this year compared to Nvidia. The chipmaker's stock has tripled in the past year and it now rivals Apple as the world's most valuable company. Yet Oracle is still headed for its best annual stock performance in a quarter of a century — and its bosses are promising there's more to come.