Nine Tech Billionaires, $152 Billion, One Brutal Thursday
Published November 7, 2026
On Thursday, November 5, 2026, the nine richest tech founders and executives lost a combined $152 billion in a single session as AI and chip stocks plunged after the Democratic midterm sweep. Elon Musk alone lost about $79.7 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index's close, with Tesla down 10.77% and SpaceX down 9.05%, falling below its June IPO price. The 500 richest people on Bloomberg's index lost $185 billion in a day — the 14th-largest one-day rout since the ranking began — a reminder that paper fortunes can vanish as fast as they appear.
Thursday, November 5, 2026, was the day the AI boom sent its bill. The nine richest tech founders and executives lost a combined $152 billion in a single trading session, according to Business Insider's calculations, as a rout in artificial-intelligence and chip stocks drove the Nasdaq 100 down more than 6 percent, its worst day since the COVID-19 pandemic, and into a correction. The 500 people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index lost a cumulative $185 billion on the day, the 14th-largest one-day rout since Bloomberg began the ranking in 2012.
Elon Musk took the biggest hit. Tesla closed down 10.77 percent at $343.69 and SpaceX fell 9.05 percent to $123.62, and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put Musk's one-day drop at $79.7 billion, leaving him at about $785 billion. Forbes' live tracker, which measures fortunes minute by minute rather than at the close, put the single-day loss higher, at $91.2 billion. Either way, it was one of the largest one-day declines of personal wealth ever recorded, and Musk sold nothing. The losses were paper, tied to share prices, and stay unrealized unless the stock is sold.
The damage spread across the whole leaderboard. Nvidia chief Jensen Huang lost about $15.1 billion, falling to $150.9 billion and dropping from ninth to 13th on the Bloomberg index, as Nvidia shares fell 9.3 percent, their biggest single-day decline since January 2023. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison lost about $10.1 billion as Oracle dropped 6.9 percent. Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell lost about $19 billion, and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg about $8 billion, by Business Insider's tally. Even after the rout, all nine remained among the 15 richest people on Earth, and by the same math Musk was still up $312 billion over 12 months.
The trigger was politics. Voters had handed Democrats a sweep in the November 3 midterm elections, winning both the House and the Senate, and investors spent Thursday repricing what that means for the AI buildout. A Democratic-controlled Congress is expected to work to constrain the construction of data centers, the giant computing facilities that are a key component of AI infrastructure, and to scrutinize the vast sums of electricity, water and land they require. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index briefly fell as much as 11 percent, its worst performance since March 2020, and Nvidia alone lost $447 billion in market value on Thursday, its second-largest one-day decline on record.
For Musk, the week was doubly expensive. He had spent close to $450 million backing Republican candidates in the midterm cycle, including at least $45 million in support of Ken Paxton's failed Senate bid in Texas, and the returns were a rout in his own backyard: Democrats won the Texas races for Senate, governor and state attorney general. Across just two trading days, Tesla and SpaceX together lost roughly $456 billion in market value, according to Dow Jones Market Data, and Musk's net worth fell about $113 billion from Tuesday's close to Thursday's, by the Bloomberg index. SpaceX, which went public in June at $135 a share in the largest IPO in history, closed Thursday at about $127, below its offering price for the first time.
The selloff was a reminder of how the richest fortunes are built, and how quickly they can shrink. The nine billionaires' wealth is overwhelmingly held in shares of the companies they run, so a bad day for the market is a bad day for the balance sheet, and a good year can still be a good year: most of the nine remain far richer than they were a year ago, thanks to the AI boom that preceded the rout. But Thursday showed the other side of that bargain. A fortune measured in hundreds of billions can lose the equivalent of a small country's economy in a single session, on nothing more than a change in what investors expect Washington to do next. The money was never in a bank account. It was in the price of a stock, and prices, unlike bank balances, can move 10 percent before lunch.
The lesson: Paper fortunes rise and fall with the market's mood — a single session can erase $152 billion that was never in anyone's bank account, and the only wealth that counts is the wealth you can keep.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories