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American technology billionaire Michael Dell lost $15.1 billion between Monday's open and late morning, as a worldwide selloff in artificial intelligence stocks reversed a record set three days earlier.
His fortune stood at $261.4 billion at 11:25 a.m. Eastern time, according to Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires list, dropping him to fourth behind Elon Musk, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos. Dell Technologies shares were down more than 6 percent at $533.15.
On Friday the same stock had risen more than 11 percent to an all-time high.
A safety proposal moved the hardware market
Nothing came from Dell Technologies in between. The trigger, according to the Financial Times, was a call by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei for leading AI companies to coordinate on managing the technology's development and safety, an effort backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Investors read coordination as a brake on spending. If frontier development slows, the capital expenditure behind data centres slows with it, and Dell sells the servers that fill them.
Nvidia fell more than 3 percent, AMD and Intel more than 5 percent each, SoftBank closed more than 10 percent lower, and Nokia dropped over 9 percent in premarket trading. ASML and Samsung also weakened. Nasdaq futures fell 1.7 percent.
Barclays strategist Emmanuel Cau said a shift toward tighter AI spending could prompt investors to reassess capital expenditure expectations.
The underlying business is growing and thinner
Dell reported second-quarter revenue of $47 billion on Sept. 1, up 58 percent, with AI-optimised server revenue doubling to $16.4 billion. It has since raised its AI server revenue forecast for the 2027 financial year to $74 billion from $60 billion.
The margin picture is less comfortable. AI-optimised servers carry mid-single-digit operating margins, so the shift in mix compresses gross margin as revenue grows. GAAP free cash flow came in around $986 million, roughly 77 percent short of analyst estimates, on inventory build and customer financing receivables tied to large AI deployments.
Silver Lake Partners IV filed on Sept. 11 to sell about $29.5 million of Dell Class C stock, continuing several weeks of disposals near the highs.
Dell's shares have still gained about 321 percent in 2026, and his fortune has more than doubled this year.
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