Elon Musk has lost his status as the world’s first trillionaire after a sharp decline in the value of his technology holdings erased around US$130 billion in paper wealth over five trading days, while a surge in the market valuations of several Chinese technology companies has created a new generation of billionaires in the country’s semiconductor and artificial intelligence sectors.
Musk acknowledged the reversal with characteristic humour on social media on Saturday, describing himself as a “(former) trillionaire” only weeks after becoming the first person to surpass the trillionaire threshold, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His decline came after steep falls in the share prices of Tesla and SpaceX, highlighting the volatility of fortunes tied to publicly traded technology companies.
The contrasting fortunes were underscored on Monday when ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s leading manufacturer of memory chips, made a spectacular debut on the Shanghai stock market. The company’s shares soared 466 per cent on their first day of trading, giving CXMT a market valuation of 3.28 trillion yuan (US$484.5 billion).
The surge substantially increased the paper wealth of the company’s leadership and technical executives. Fourteen CXMT directors, senior executives and core technical personnel, together with close relatives, collectively hold just over 2 billion shares in the company indirectly. Chairman Zhu Yiming now holds shares valued at nearly 80 billion yuan (US$11.8 billion), while president and core technical expert Cao Kanyu holds shares worth more than 10 billion yuan.
China’s artificial intelligence sector also recorded significant gains. Tang Jie, founder and chief technology officer of Chinese AI company Z.ai, also known as Zhipu, is now worth about HK$35.8 billion (US$4.6 billion) based on Monday’s closing share price. Zhipu listed in Hong Kong in January.
Yan Junjue, the 37-year-old founder and chief executive of MiniMax, another Chinese AI company that also listed in Hong Kong in January, now possesses a fortune of roughly HK$18.2 billion.
Earlier this month, Yan announced that he would forgo all salary until MiniMax achieves artificial general intelligence, the industry’s term for AI systems capable of matching or surpassing human cognitive abilities. He also pledged to allocate personal shares equal to 4 per cent of the company’s total equity as long-term employee incentives and dedicate an additional 1 per cent stake to support relevant open-source communities.
Analysts noted that the fortunes of technology entrepreneurs on both sides of the Pacific remain overwhelmingly tied to equity holdings rather than liquid assets, making them highly sensitive to market movements.
“Stocks move in natural cycles, an inherent law of financial markets,” said Liu Shengjun, chief of the China Financial Reform Institute, a Shanghai-based think tank. He contrasted today’s technology entrepreneurs with earlier property tycoons, saying that “today’s tech magnates create huge societal wealth with their intelligence and innovation.”
Liu also described entrepreneurship as the “primary productive force of modern economy”, adding that entrepreneurs are “an extremely scarce and indispensable asset” because they are genuine creators of tangible economic value. He said China was “incredibly lucky to have fostered this group of entrepreneurs.”
Musk’s reversal followed a difficult week for his business empire. Tesla shares fell 18 per cent, their steepest weekly decline since 2022, closing at US$313.03 on Friday after the company’s earnings report failed to meet expectations. The company said heavy spending on future projects, including robotaxis, humanoid robots and a semiconductor fabrication facility being developed with sister companies SpaceX and xAI, pushed cash flow into negative territory for the first time in two years.
Tesla shares have now declined by roughly 30 per cent this year, making the electric vehicle manufacturer the weakest performer among the major technology giants. SpaceX shares also continued their slide, closing at US$115.07 on Friday, their lowest level since the company’s US$75 billion initial public offering in June, the listing that had initially propelled Musk into trillionaire territory.
