Ellison, Bezos Lose $66-B from Their Net Worths Since Jan. 1

When it comes to the world’s richest billionaires, tech founders litter the top of the list.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s fortune has dropped by $14 billion. (Illustration: DonkeyHotey Flickr) 

AI has been heralded as a multitrillion-dollar industry, catapulting many founders to extreme wealth, but now bubble fears and doubts over valuations have led to billions being erased from CEOs’ net worths overnight, Emma Burleigh reported for Fortune.

For Larry Ellison, whose net worth has been hit the hardest, that amounts to a $59.2 billion loss since the year started — and it’s only February.

After months of raised eyebrows over software stocks and AI’s impact on the sector, a selloff on Tuesday triggered billions in losses among the wealthiest.

In the few days since then, Ellison has watched his wealth slide by $19 billion, according to current data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s fortune has dropped by $14 billion.

The Tuesday selloff, turbocharged by Anthropic’s new legal AI tool, also sent the already dwindling fortunes of software billionaires tumbling even further.

Following the broad retreat that saw the S&P 500 software and services index fall by nearly 4 percent, at least $62 billion has been wiped from the net worth of the industry’s wealthiest entrepreneurs so far this year, according to a Bloomberg analysis of its Billionaires Index.