Fortune roller-coaster: as Elon Musk loses US$130b, Chinese chip and AI founders gain
Surging stocks of CXMT, Zhipu and MiniMax create billions in wealth as world’s first trillionaire loses status amid SpaceX’s plunge
Elon Musk poked fun at himself on social media on Saturday, saying he was a “(former) trillionaire” after losing around US$130 billion over five trading days just weeks after he became the first human to ascend beyond billionaire status.
At the same time, the wealth of some executives at ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s leading maker of memory chips, surged as its stock soared 466 per cent on its first trading day in Shanghai on Monday, valuing the company at 3.28 trillion yuan (US$484.5 billion).
Much of the wealth held by tech tycoons in both the US and China is paper wealth rather than accessible liquid assets and is also highly volatile, analysts said.
“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. “Unlike previous property tycoons like Hui Ka-yan and Wang Jianlin, today’s tech magnates create huge societal wealth with their intelligence and innovation.”
Fourteen CXMT directors, senior executives and core technical personnel, together with close relatives, hold just over 2 billion shares in the company indirectly.
Chairman Zhu Yiming and president and core technical expert Cao Kanyu hold shares valued at nearly 80 billion yuan (US$11.8 billion) and over 10 billion yuan, respectively.
Meanwhile, Tang Jie, founder and chief technology officer of Chinese AI firm Z.ai, also known as Zhipu, is worth about HK$35.8 billion (US$4.6 billion) based on the Monday closing price of the company’s stock, which listed in Hong Kong in January.