Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang lost tens of billions and fell out of the $100 billion club on Tuesday. The nosedive in Nvidia shares saw Huang’s wealth drop by about $9,9 billion to approximately 94.9 dollars based on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index” The drop knocked Huang out of the ranks including titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett.
The slide in Huang’s wealth dropped him down four places on the world rich list from the 14th to the 18th. He is in fourth place, behind Indian industrialist Gautam Adani with $102 billion; by the three surviving children of Walmart founder Sam Walton: Jim ($99.9 billion), Rob($97.6B); and AliceWalton(96.9).
The decrease was largely a product of Nvidia stock plummeting 9.5% on Tuesday, the largest single-day loss ever experienced by an American company. That blow saw Nvidia lose nearly $279 billion of its value, crashing it to levels that just about swallowed the whole company worth Netflix around at $290 billion.
The drop followed a selloff in chip stocks after Bloomberg reported that Nvidia had received requests for information on potential anti-competitive practices as part of an investigation by the Department of Justice. But Nvidia is also an AI powerhouse, and despite the recent hiccup, it remains one of the most prominent providers of silicon chips that are essential to this great tech category being a thing now with customers like Elon Musk’s Tesla and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Taking a recent hit, Huang is still about $51 billion richer this year alone on the strength of Nvidia’s stock rising 118% since January. Its actual announced market value of $2.65 trillion is not only the next most valuable in general, behind Apple ($3.4 Trillion) and Microsoft ($3 TRN), but has risen by over 100% this last year alone!
While Huang has been on board with Nvidia from the beginning when he co-founded it in 1993, its valuation took off around the end of 2022 after a surge in interest in AI thanks to the release of ChatGPT. In the years since Nvidia’s first split, its stock price is up more than 600% from under $15 to over a hundred dollars on Tuesday.
