Larry Ellison, the Oracle ORCL co-founder and one of the richest people on the planet, watched $22.6 billion disappear in a single day on January 27—and he didn't even have to lift a finger. The selloff was brutal, wiping out 12% of his fortune, all because of an AI startup that barely existed two years ago.
But Ellison wasn’t alone in feeling the sting. In fact, another tech titan took an even bigger hit. Jensen Huang, the co-founder of Nvidia NVDA, saw his fortune plummet by a massive $20.1 billion—a drop that set a new record for the "biggest single-day loss of value for any public company in history," according to Forbes.
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DeepSeek's AI Breakthrough Sparked a Market Panic
The chaos started when DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, launched its DeepSeek R1 chatbot—a model that suddenly had everyone questioning whether Silicon Valley's AI dominance was as untouchable as it seemed.
Here's why: DeepSeek's AI is open-source, meaning developers can inspect and tweak it freely. The open-source nature of DeepSeek’s model could radically transform the AI ecosystem.
More importantly, it reportedly cost them only $5.6 million to develop—a fraction of the billions being dumped into AI by U.S. tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and, of course, Oracle.
The result? A massive selloff in AI-heavy stocks. Oracle, Nvidia, and Microsoft MSFT all took a hit, but Ellison was the day's biggest loser.
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Some Billionaires Came Out on Top
Not everyone suffered. While Ellison and Huang lost billions, Mark Zuckerberg walked away $4.3 billion richer, and Jeff Bezos pocketed an extra $632 million. The market doesn't play favorites—it just rewards whoever's on the right side of the trade.
The Market Rebounded—But This Isn't Over
On January 28, stocks like Nvidia and Oracle started climbing back. Nvidia jumped nearly 9%. Forbes said in an article, "Nvidia's Tuesday bounce became the second best day for any stock ever in terms of market value added." Oracle gained 3.6%, and investors took a deep breath. But this wasn't just another market dip—it was a wake-up call.
DeepSeek's rise proves that the AI race isn't just about who spends the most money. A tiny startup just sent the biggest names in tech scrambling—and it could be anyone next. As Mark Cuban famously predicted, the world's first trillionaire will be the person who creates AI in a way we've never imagined before. DeepSeek's sudden dominance shows just how real that possibility is. A company that didn't exist two years ago just shook up Silicon Valley, proving that game-changing AI doesn't have to come from the usual suspects.
As for Larry Ellison? He's still a billionaire several times over, and this loss probably won't keep him up at night. Forbes reports his real-time net worth at $206.6 billion on January 29. But regardless of his climb back to the 4th place spot in the billionaire ranking, Silicon Valley just got a reality check — and it came from China.
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