How China's DeepSeek cost Musk and others billions this year
What's the story
The meteoric rise of Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, has drastically changed the fortunes of several tech moguls. Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly lost an estimated $90 billion in net worth owing to the AI firm's success. His net worth declined from about $433 billion in early February to $349 billion on February 28. Following him were NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who are said to have lost around $20 billion and $11 billion, respectively.
Market impact
DeepSeek's success hits NVIDIA hard
DeepSeek's meteoric rise has also taken a toll on NVIDIA, triggering a selloff and a $600 billion loss in market value for the AI chip-making giant. This decline is said to be one of the biggest in the history of the US stock market, Bloomberg reported. DeepSeek's success has collectively erased around $94 billion from the wealth of tech billionaires, according to Fortune.
Praise
Huang commends DeepSeek's innovation and global impact
Despite the financial losses his company has suffered due to DeepSeek's rise, Huang praised the "excellent innovation" during NVIDIA's earnings call. He also noted that the Chinese start-up has "ignited global enthusiasm" and open-sourced a world-class reasoning AI model. This even as NVIDIA's major customers, Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are reportedly set to invest about $320 billion in AI and data center expansion.