The $13.5 Billion That Evaporated in 2026
Published October 19, 2026
AppLovin co-founder and CEO Adam Foroughi watched $13.5 billion of his net worth disappear in 2026 — a 53.9% drop that left him with $11.6 billion and the sixth-largest dollar loss among the world's billionaires this year. The mobile-advertising company's stock fell 53.8% year-to-date, the third-worst performance in the S&P 500, and Foroughi owns roughly 11% of it.
The numbers read like a typo. In the first nine months of 2026, Adam Foroughi's fortune fell by $13.5 billion — more than half of it gone, down 53.9%, leaving the AppLovin chief executive with $11.6 billion and a tumble to 317th place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At the end of 2025 he had been worth $25.1 billion. Only five billionaires on the planet lost more dollars in 2026, among them Bernard Arnault and Larry Ellison, who were down $70.1 billion and $47.2 billion respectively.
To understand the scale of the ride, you have to look at the whole chart, not just this year's plunge. Foroughi co-founded AppLovin, a mobile and digital marketing company, and took it public in 2021 at a $24 billion valuation; he was worth about $4.35 billion at the listing. Then the stock fell hard enough that in parts of 2023 his net worth dropped below $1 billion — a genuine near-erasure for a man who had briefly been a multi-billionaire. The recovery that followed was ferocious: by December 2025 he was valued at $27.3 billion, more than 27 times his 2023 low. What 2026 has taken away is roughly half of that peak.
The trigger was a one-two punch. AppLovin's shares were already under pressure from short-seller reports in 2025, the kind of attacks that question a company's accounting and business model and force every investor to re-examine the thesis. Then 2026's broader market selloff in richly valued tech names did the rest. The stock fell 53.8% year-to-date, ranking as the third-worst performer among all S&P 500 companies — a brutal distinction for a business valued at more than $100 billion.
The mechanism of the loss is the simplest fact in the story: Foroughi owns an estimated 11% of AppLovin, so his wealth and the company's share price are the same thing wearing two hats. When a fortune is that concentrated, there is no cushion — no diversified portfolio absorbing the shock, no second business offsetting the decline. Every percentage point the stock falls, his fortune falls with it, tick for tick. The paper loss is staggering, but it is also, in a sense, the price of the paper gain: the same concentration that built $27.3 billion in four years is what is unwinding it now.
It is worth keeping perspective, because billionaires' losses flatter their drama. Foroughi's $11.6 billion is still nearly triple what he was worth at the 2021 IPO, and more than eleven times his 2023 trough. He has not been ruined; he has been repriced. The employees and shareholders who bought near the top, without a multi-billion-dollar cushion, felt the same percentage decline on a very different human scale.
The lesson of AppLovin is the lesson of every concentrated fortune: a position is not a portfolio. Owning a tenth of one company means your net worth has a single point of failure, and the market does not care how good the story was when it revisits the price. Diversification is boring, which is exactly why it survives the years that exciting does not.
The lesson: A fortune concentrated in one stock rides that stock's chart — up 27x or down 54%, a position is not a portfolio.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories