Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison has now seen an unprecedented $50 billion wiped off his net worth in less than forty days this year, as per Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ellison’s fortune stood at $199 billion by Wednesday’s (February 4) close, down sharply from $247 billion at the start of January. A single-day slump of 5% in Oracle’s stock erased about $9 billion from this wealth, deepening the decline.The round in software stocks was triggered by Anthropic’s release of plugins for its Claude Cowork AI agent, which can easily automate corporate tasks in legal, scales, finance, marketing and data analysis. Investors now fear that such tools could lead to reduction in the demand for external software from established giants such as Adobe, Salesforce, Intuit and Atlassian. Shares of all these companies tumbled earlier this week before staging a particle rebound, but Oracle’s loses remained steep.

Ellison was not alone other tech leaders also hit hard

Ellison was not along in facing the sharp decline in net worth. Along with him, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also saw his net worth fall by around $11 billion, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost around $8 billion. On the other hand, other tech leaders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang each shed around $5 billion as the stocks of the companies dropped by at least 2%.

Oracle’s risky AI bet

For those unaware, Oracle has aggressively positioned itself as an important player in the AI boom, the company has signed deals with Nvidia and OpenAI in order to offer data centers powering next-generation technology. However, its heavy spending and increasing debt have raised concerns among analysts. The company’s remaining performance obligations — contracted sales not yet recognized as revenue — surged 438% year-over-year to $523 billion as of November 30, nearly ten times its annual revenue of $53 billion.Critics believe that Oracle may be overspending. Popular American investor Michael Burry has publicly bet against Oracle. Burry has warned that the company’s debt-fueled expansion tied to AI contracts was unnecessary, calling the moves “hard to explain” and suggesting that “ego” might be driving decisions.