Jewish billionaire Michael Dell loses over $20 billion in a single day
Dell Technologies shares tumbled after a Barclays downgrade.
The short version
- The drop marks the steepest fall since July.
- Michael Dell still holds a 40 percent stake in the hardware and server maker.
Jewish billionaire Michael Dell saw his net worth tumble by more than $20 billion on Wednesday following a sharp decline in Dell Technologies shares. The drop pushed him down to the fifth spot among the world's wealthiest individuals. The decline marked Dell Technologies' steepest intraday drop since July.
Barclays, the British multinational universal bank, triggered the slide by downgrading the stock from 'overweight' to 'equal-weight' ahead of the opening bell. Shares of the hardware and server maker were down 11.1 percent shortly before market close, according to Forbes. The drop places Michael Dell just behind Alphabet co-founder Sergey Brin, whose own wealth declined by around $4 billion to $262.3 billion as Alphabet shares slipped.
Alphabet is the technology conglomerate that owns Google. The decline represents a step down from last month, when Dell briefly became the world's second-richest person behind Elon Musk after his net worth surpassed $270 billion. Dell now holds a slim lead over Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg for the fifth position on the global wealth index.
Meta owns Facebook and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg's net worth stood at an estimated $253.1 billion on Wednesday afternoon. Dell Technologies has been a major beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, driven by surging demand for its high-performance servers and data center infrastructure.
Michael Dell retains an estimated 40 percent stake in the tech giant he established in the 1980s. Wednesday's drop in the stock also mirrored a broader Wall Street sell-off. US equity benchmarks fell after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released hotter-than-expected inflation data.
Shortly before close, the S&P 500 had slipped 1.2 percent, the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 1.9 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.2 percent. Despite the single-day slump, Dell's net worth has surged by more than $157 billion over the past year.
Photo: Dell Technologies, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
