AI boom adds over $550 billion to the wealth of US tech billionaires

The wealthiest tech billionaires in the US have added more than $550 billion to their total net worth this year, capitalizing on the investor frenzy surrounding leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

According to Bloomberg data, at the close of the New York Stock Exchange on Christmas Eve, the top 10 US tech founders and CEOs held approximately $2.5 trillion in cash, stocks, and other investments.

This figure rose from $1.9 trillion at the start of the year, occurring as the S&P 500 increased by more than 18%.

Silicon Valley leaders profited from hundreds of billions of dollars spent globally on AI chips, data centers, and related products, though some of these gains have diminished in recent months due to concerns over an AI-driven investment bubble.

Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University and an advisor to OpenAI, stated, “All of this is speculative and linked to the success of artificial intelligence. There is a major question mark over whether this will pay off, but investors are betting that it will.”

Although Elon Musk was briefly dethroned in September when Oracle founder Larry Ellison surpassed him, Musk continues to lead the list with a net worth that has reached $645 billion, an increase of approximately 50%.

The billionaire’s wealth surged during a year in which he signed a $1 trillion payment agreement with Tesla shareholders and the valuation of his rocket company, SpaceX, rose to $800 billion.

Another winner of the AI boom is Nvidia founder Jensen Huang. As Nvidia rapidly grew to become the world’s largest public company with a market value of over $4 trillion, Huang climbed to the position of the eighth-richest tech executive in the US with a net worth of $156 billion.

According to securities filings, Huang sold over $1 billion worth of stock this year, taking advantage of Nvidia’s rise as the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced AI chips.

Jeff Bezos also sold $5.6 billion worth of shares this year, while Michael Dell divested more than $2 billion in shares of the tech company that bears his name. Mark Zuckerberg fell in the rankings following a recent decline in his social media company’s share price, as investors began to worry about massive spending on AI infrastructure and compensation agreements for top AI researchers.

Ellison saw his net worth soar after announcing three months ago that Oracle had entered into a $300 billion data center deal with OpenAI. However, concerns regarding how the group is financing data center construction caused Oracle’s share price to drop 40% from its peak in September.

Zuckerberg and Ellison were overtaken by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose net worths rose to $270 billion and $255 billion, respectively, as the search giant made significant strides with its own AI models and chips.

Bill Gates was the only individual on the list to end the year with a lower net worth than his starting value, as he continued to sell shares in the software giant to fund his philanthropy activities.