Billionaires have lost more than $60 billion since the beginning of the year due to the collapse of software developers

The fortunes of American billionaires whose companies earn money from software development have fallen by at least $62 billion this year, Bloomberg has calculated. The sector is experiencing a massive sell-off as investors fear that the penetration of AI will wipe out the prospects of traditional software.

On Tuesday, February 3 alone, software developers and data providers lost a combined 300 billion in capitalization after the collapse caused by the release of the new Cowork AI assistant from startup Anthropic. The market took it as a direct threat to such players. The flight from their stocks continued on Wednesday.

Eight of the ten biggest drops in fortune in percentage terms, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, came from billionaires who got rich from software companies this year.

The three founders of AppLovin, a marketing platform that places ads in mobile games, have each lost about 30% of their capital since the beginning of the year. They topped the list of the most significant losses. The company's 47-year-old CEO Adam Forougie suffered the most: his fortune has decreased by $7.8 billion and is now valued at $17.3 billion - $10 billion less than at its peak in December. AppLovin shares were hit by a selloff in video game developer stocks following the release of Google's Project Genie AI builder. Another blow for was the shorts' report. The company has lost 42% of its value since the beginning of the year.

The fortune of the 85-year-old co-founder of the developer of software for human resources management Workday Dave Duffield, largely consisting of shares of the company, this year fell by 19% - to $ 11.3 billion. Quotes Workday fell to the lowest price in three years by the end of trading on Tuesday. They had rebounded more than 5% on Wednesday, but remain down more than 20% since the start of the year.

Larry Ellison, founder of cloud software developer Oracle, who briefly became the world's richest man in September, has lost nearly $40 billion after the company's stock plunged 16% this year. The billionaire now ranks sixth in the Bloomberg index with a fortune of $207.5 billion.

Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, which develops accounting software, owned $4.4 billion in November 2022, and by July 2025, he had nearly doubled his capital to a five-year high of $8.5 billion, making him one of the 500 richest people in the world, according to Bloomberg. Intuit shares collapsed 11% on Tuesday, the biggest drop since March 2020. On Wednesday, quotes recouped some of the losses, but by the close of trading, the company's capitalization had fallen by almost a third since the beginning of the year. Cook's fortune fell by 17% to $6.5 billion, which knocked him out of the ranking of the richest billionaires, the agency writes.

The losses also affected players from related sectors, in particular, private equity funds, which will now have to reconsider their bets on the IT sector, Bloomberg explains. Orlando Bravo's Thoma Bravo fund has lost almost 12% of its capital since the beginning of the year, retaining $13.1 billion. The fund specializes in buying and developing software companies. Also on Tuesday, shares of similar investment funds Blue Owl Capital, Ares Management and KKR collapsed, writes Reuters.

The fortune of Coinbase Global cryptocurrency exchange head Brian Armstrong has fallen 18 percent since the beginning of the year and 44 percent since Oct. 31, the biggest drop among U.S. billionaires in three months, Bloomberg calculated.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor