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5 Big Tech bosses see nearly $200 billion wealth wipeout this year

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Five Big Tech bosses have taken a nearly $200 billion blow to their combined net worth this year as AI buzz eases and the US and Israel’s war with Iran continues to spook investors.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder and tech chief, has seen his personal fortune shrink by about $60 billion since the start of January, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows.

Ellison was worth $188 billion at Friday’s close, well off a peak of nearly $400 billion in September last year, when he briefly dethroned Elon Musk as the world’s richest person.

His sharp wealth drop has been fueled by a nearly 30% plunge in Oracle’s stock price this year, as investors have soured on the enterprise-software giant’s debt-fueled buildout of AI data centers.

Meta cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a $46 billion hit to his wealth this year, reducing it to $187 billion at Friday’s close.

Shares of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp’s parent company have tumbled 20% this year as the social-media giant fends off lawsuits and faces mounting skepticism over its massive AI spending plans.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are down about $31 billion, $32 billion, and $29 billion year to date.

Shares of the e-commerce behemoth and the search-and-advertising titan are down around 14% and 12% each this year, as investors have pared their bets on blue-sky AI growth projections.

Broad losses

These five men alone have seen a combined $198 billion erased from their net worths this year. Other big names in business are deep in the red too: former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is down $41 billion this year at $128 billion as of Friday’s close, reflecting a 26% slump in the enterprise-software group’s stock price.

Outside of tech, LVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault has seen his wealth wiped out by almost $58 billion this year, driven by a 29% tumble in the luxury giant’s stock.

World stocks have broadly sold off in recent weeks as the Iran conflict has thrown financial markets into disarray.

The virtual closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route for global flows of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), has spiked crude prices, heaped fresh pressure on consumers, eroded growth forecasts, reignited inflation fears, and dashed hopes for rapid interest-rate cuts in several countries.

Page, Bezos, Brin, Ellison, Zuckerberg, and Arnault rank second to seventh on Bloomberg’s rich list, in that order. Musk still tops the ranking with a $17 billion gain this year to $637 billion. That reflects the soaring valuations of his private businesses, such as SpaceX and xAI, as Tesla stock is down 20% this year.

Huge excitement about AI and its potential to supercharge productivity and multiply corporate profits have driven tech stocks to new highs in recent years.

But skeptics such as Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame have warned that the buzz has created a bubble characterized by nosebleed valuations, overbuilding, and circular dealmaking that will end badly.




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Lovable exec says ‘big boys and girls’ like OpenAI and Anthropic worry her more than other vibe coding startups

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Other vibe coding players are not the biggest competition, says one Lovable exec.

“I always worry about the big boys and girls in the world,” Lovable’s head of growth Elena Verna said on a Sunday episode of the “20VC” podcast. “So, OpenAIs, Anthropics, Googles, Apples, more so than our competitors that spring up from the bottom or from sideways.”

This is because the distribution power of these tech giants and frontier labs in the market is unparalleled, she said.

Stockholm-based Lovable was valued at $6.6 billion in a December funding round led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures. It competes with other vibe coding startups like Cursor, Replit, and Emergent, as well as far bigger and better-funded players, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft, that make their own AI coding tools.

Verna, who joined the startup last May after a series of advisory and head of growth stints at various startups, said that in a world where products are becoming increasingly similar, distribution and growth are winning strategies.

“Whoever has the best distribution that is earned, that is competitively defensible, that is sustainable, that is predictable, is going to be the winner in the market,” she said. “I worry about the companies that have that figured out.”

Verna’s comments about competition follow a period of brutal comparisons between products made by vibe coding startups and Anthropic’s Claude Code.

After Anthropic released its latest model, Opus 4.6, founders and developers said on X that they are ditching their expensive Cursor and Lovable subscriptions for Claude Code.

Still, Lovable is going strong.

The Swedish startup’s annual recurring revenue has surged by more than 30%, from $300 million to $400 million in a single month, Business Insider reported. ARR, a key metric to gauge startup performance, refers to the predictable revenue a company expects to generate over a year.

Lovable’s chief revenue officer, Ryan Meadows, told Business Insider that the company plans to more than double its head count by the end of 2026, from 146 to 350 employees.

He added that Lovable, which specializes in making coding user-friendly, sees at least 200,000 new vibe coding projects created each day.




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Lucid Motors: 5 big announcements on autonomy, robotaxi bet

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Lucid Motors is making a big swing toward autonomy, pursuing self-driving in personal cars and a two-seater robotaxi that would rival Tesla’s Cybercab.

During the company’s investor day in New York City on Thursday, interim CEO Marc Winterhoff said Lucid Motors’ investment in robotaxis and autonomy will play a key role in bringing the company to profitability.

“L4 is our north star — to get there as fast as possible,” he said, “and in the end, be a profitable company and cash-flow positive.”

Lucid Motors executives laid out the road map for its robotaxi, which includes a “business-to-business” strategy partnering with companies like Uber, and a timeline for deploying self-driving technology for consumer vehicles by 2029.

With its current portfolio of luxury EV sedans and newly announced investments in midsize SUVs and autonomous driving, Lucid said in its presentation that it expects to target a market that will grow to more than $700 billion by 2035.

Here are the five biggest announcements the EV maker made on autonomy.

Uber partnership deepens

Lucid’s robotaxi partnership with Uber may go beyond the Gravity SUVs that the ride-hailing company has agreed to use for its self-driving fleet.

Lucid said it’s entering the midsize EV market, directly competing with the Tesla Model Y, with two new cars called Lucid Cosmos and Lucid Earth. Starting prices for the EVs will be under $50,000, the company said.

With those midsize SUVs, Lucid said it’s in “advanced discussions” with Uber to scale the ride-hailing company’s robotaxi vehicle platform.

Lucid announced last year that it committed 20,000 Gravity units for Uber’s robotaxis, while the ride-hailing giant has invested $300 million into the EV maker.

Lucid robotaxis set for 2026 launch

The company reaffirmed on Thursday that the commercial launch of Uber’s robotaxi service, through a partnership with Nuro and Lucid, is “on track” for late 2026.

Lucid’s VP of autonomy and advanced driver assistance systems, Kai Stepper, said on Thursday that Uber has been given 80 Gravity SUVs within the past half year for data collection and testing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lucid will take on Tesla’s Cybercab

Lucid unveiled a concept for its two-seater robotaxi called “Lunar.”

The car is purpose-built, much like Tesla’s Cybercab or Zoox’s robotaxi, which means the vehicle has no pedals or steering wheel. The concept car that was shown during the presentation included a large console screen that stretched across the dashboard.

Winterhoff said the Lunar will be based on the same platform as the new midsize EVs, allowing for quick ramp-up of production.

The executive said the company expects operating costs to be 40% lower than the robotaxis in the current market; although he did not specify an operator.

Lucid did not explicitly say whether Lunar would be deployed through its partnership with Uber, but Winterhoff revealed the concept car during his conversation with Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s chief operating officer.

“First of all, I feel like I’m sitting in a personal theater with a comfy chair and lots of leg room and the media center in front of me,” Macdonald said. “Second of all, I think our customers are going to love it.”

‘Full Self-Driving’ tech comes to Lucid

Lucid is also betting on self-driving in personally owned cars, outlining a timeline for fully autonomous driving, or Level 4 autonomy, during its investor day.

The company said it expects to deploy hands-free highway driving in the second quarter of 2026; hands-free highway and city driving by 2027; Level 3 autonomy, which allows for eyes-off driving, in 2028; and Level 4 autonomy, or the autonomous driving seen in Waymo’s robotaxi, in 2029.

Winterhoff said during the presentation that the software will be comparable to FSD, or Tesla’s Full Self-Driving, “or better.”

The company did not indicate whether this will enable Lucid to pursue its own robotaxi service. Stepper said Lucid is pursuing a business-to-business strategy for autonomous ride-hailing programs.

Subscription will be a key revenue driver

Lucid is joining a slew of automakers hoping to increase revenue through subscriptions to its self-driving technology.

The company revealed a tiered subscription service for its ADAS, called DreamDrive Pro, that ranges from $69 per month to $199 a month.

The specific features for each tier were not detailed, but the service will range from Level 2+ driving to Level 4 driving.

“Autonomy subscriptions are the single biggest software monetization opportunity,” the company said in its slide deck.




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Palantir’s tech head explains how he manages stars — and how he owned a big screwup to the CEO

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Palantir’s chief technology officer uses a “Superman” analogy to help manage the company’s brightest talent.

On an episode of the “Invest Like The Best” podcast released on Tuesday, Shyam Sankar shared how he helps employees identify which skills to embrace and which to avoid.

“Superpowers are effortless,” he said. “My analogy for this is it Superman could fly. He could see through walls. But that wasn’t some sort of arduous thing for him to do. It’s just something he could do.”

The Palantir CTO, who has been with the defense tech giant for 20 years, added that the other side of this is identifying your “kryptonite” — in the series, a mineral fatal to Superman.

“It’s not like something you can work on. The only strategy for Superman around kryptonite was to avoid it,” Sankar said.

He added that the company supports employees in uncovering these weaknesses.

“The discovery of kryptonite usually involves you being exposed to it,” he said. “You don’t want to create a culture which is like, you fuck this up, I gotta fire you.”

Palantir culture

On the podcast, Sankar shared that he once made a big mistake, which he took to the company’s CEO, Alex Karp.

“I sheepishly went into Alex and was just completely honest,” he said. “He was also in pain as he internalized what this was going to mean. But he valued the fact that I wouldn’t try to hide it.”

Sankar added that the episode taught him that it was important to have an environment that allows mistakes.

Palantir is known across tech for its anti-hierarchical, untraditional company culture.

According to staffers on the company’s YouTube videos, Palantir is split into micro-teams, and employees report to their teammates. One hiring manager said that, for a project to which a Big Tech company would assign 30 engineers, Palantir only assigns three to four.

The company’s leadership has also embraced ditching diplomas in favor of real-world learning.

On an August earnings call, Karp, who holds a law degree from Stanford and a doctorate from Germany’s Goethe University, said “no one cares” about educational backgrounds at the company.




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An Accel VC says the vibe coding market is big enough for Cursor and Claude Code

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The great vibe coding war of 2026 isn’t the bloodbath it appears, says a venture capitalist whose firm backed Cursor.

On an episode of the “20VC” podcast released on Monday, Miles Clements, a partner at VC firm Accel, said that the AI-assisted coding industry is big enough for Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cursor.

After Anthropic released its latest model, Opus 4.6, last month, founders and developers said on X that they are ditching Cursor for Anthropic’s Claude Code.

“This market is growing enormously, and I don’t think a lot of these companies are actually experiencing success at the expense of the others,” Clements said.

Cursor, founded in 2022, was valued at $29.3 billion late last year. Accel first invested in the AI coding startup in June and co-led its $2.3 billion Series D round in November.

On the podcast, Clements called Claude Code an “amazing product.” Still, he said, there are two reasons Claude’s latest improvements don’t hurt Cursor.

“First of all, they’re bringing so many new cohorts of users online, so people who would not have been software developers a year ago today can be software developers with these tools,” he said.

Second, the market is expanding because consumption per customer is increasing, Clements added.

Last week, Chamath Palihapitiya, a VC and the founder of software incubator 8090, said that Cursor was one of his company’s biggest AI costs.

“We need to migrate off of Cursor,” he wrote on X. “It’s just too expensive vs Claude Code. The latter is equivalent, and if you use the Pro plan, you eliminate huge Cursor bills for token consumption.”

Cursor did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

On a podcast released in late February, Insight Partners cofounder Jerry Murdock said that Cursor is behind its peers.

“Most of the companies I mentioned, their view is that Cursor is obsolete today,” he said. “I think those guys are going to have to quickly embrace autonomous agents.”

On Monday’s podcast, Clements countered Murdock’s remarks.

“Like, all due respect, I thought about playing in the NFL, but instead I walked onto a college football team and was the fifth-string inside linebacker,” he said. “You’re not looking at any real metrics. Like, who are these people to make these judgments?”

A representative for Murdock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.




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Here are 3 big ways that parents and youth differ on AI

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Most parents think that using AI for schoolwork is unethical. Most kids and teens think it should actually be encouraged.

That’s just one place where parents and youth differ in their views on AI use, according to a new report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that aims to promote the well-being of families and children when it comes to technology use.

According to the report, which centered around a survey of over 1,200 parents and 1,100 kids and teens between the ages of 12 and 17 across the United States, there are some significant gaps between parents and youth when it comes to AI.

Here are three key gaps the survey identified.

The ethics of using AI for schoolwork

One of the most significant gaps between parents and youth is on usage for schoolwork.

Fifty-two percent of parents believe that the use of AI for school assignments is “unethical and deserves consequences.”

On the other hand, just 34% of youth hold that same position, while 52% think that using AI for school work is “innovative and should be encouraged.

Parents have some incorrect assumptions about how youth use AI

The survey asked parents what they thought kids between the ages of 12 and 17 were mainly using AI for. Then, they asked youth in that same age bracket what they were actually doing.

That revealed some interesting discrepancies. For example, 23% of adults said that youth use AI primarily for companionship, while just 8% of youth said so.

Parents also underestimate how much youth use AI for more basic tasks. Thirty-five percent of youth said they use AI mainly to brainstorm ideas, while just 21% of parents thought that was the case.

Additionally, 59% of youth said they use AI for searching for information and facts, a full 17 percentage points higher than the 42% of parents who said they thought youth were mainly using AI for that purpose.

The ability to tell whether something is AI-generated or not

It turns out that parents have less faith in youth’s ability to tell AI apart from humans than youth do.

Just 42% of parents said that youth can tell if they’re interacting with an AI system or a human, while 70% of kids and teens said that they could.

Both groups have only moderate confidence in the ability of parents to recognize AI-generated content.

Fifty-eight percent of kids and teens are confident in their parents’ ability to do so, while just 53% of parents said the same.




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