American billionaire Jensen Huang loses $15.1 billion, drops out of top 10 richest

Taiwanese-American billionaire Jensen Huang, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., dropped out of the world's 10 richest people on Thursday after the chipmaker's shares suffered their steepest fall in almost two years.

Huang's net worth fell $15.1 billion to $150.9 billion on Nov. 5, pushing him from ninth to 13th place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Nvidia shares closed at $181.60 in New York, down 9.3% from $200.13 a day earlier, the biggest one-day decline since January 2025.

The selloff hit nearly every large fortune built on technology. The 500 people on the index lost $185 billion between them on Thursday, the 14th-biggest one-day drop since the ranking began in 2012. Elon Musk, the world's richest person, lost $79.7 billion as Tesla Inc. and SpaceX fell, and Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison lost $10.1 billion as Oracle shares dropped 6.9%. Together, the three men accounted for more than half of the day's losses.

Data center fears

Investors sold chipmakers and other companies tied to the construction of data centers for artificial intelligence, on concern that Democrats, after gains in Tuesday's midterm elections, will move to slow that build-out. The Nasdaq Composite had its worst day in 18 months.

Few fortunes are as exposed to that spending as Huang's. Nvidia's graphics processors are the main chips used to train and run AI models, and most of the company's revenue now comes from sales to data center operators, including Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.

The drop came in what had been a strong year for technology billionaires. They hold 36% of the wealth on the index and had been on track for their best year on record.

Ellison has had a harder run. Oracle shares have fallen sharply since the company raised $20 billion this week through a sale of new stock and bonds to pay for its AI data center buildout, and his fortune has roughly halved over the past year.

Back in the pack

Huang has been in and out of the top 10 this year as Nvidia's shares swung on views about AI spending. He fell out of the group in February, when a rally in Walmart Inc. shares lifted the Walton family above him, before climbing back.

Huang, 63, was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States as a child. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and has run it ever since. The company became the first in the world to reach a market value of $5 trillion last year. Most of Huang's wealth comes from his stake in Nvidia, which he has trimmed through regular share sales under prearranged trading plans.