Jewish billionaire Sergey Brin loses $29 billion as Alphabet suffers worst day
Alphabet shares plunged 12% on Thursday in a massive market drop.
The short version
- Jewish billionaire Sergey Brin lost $29 billion on paper in the slide.
- Investors worried about slowing search growth and heavy spending on artificial intelligence.
- The historic drop wiped more than $500 billion off the company value.
Jewish billionaire Sergey Brin lost about $29 billion on paper on Thursday as Alphabet, which owns Google, suffered its worst single-day drop since the company went public in 2004. Alphabet shares fell more than 12% to about $283.29 after investors reacted to slowing growth in its core search business and heavy spending on artificial intelligence, according to Yahoo Finance.
The selloff wiped more than $500 billion off Alphabet’s market value. Brin’s fellow Google cofounder, Larry Page, lost about $31 billion, bringing the founders’ combined paper losses to about $60 billion based on Forbes estimates. Neither has confirmed selling shares.
Search revenue rose 12% to about $63.4 billion, short of the roughly 15% growth investors had expected. Alphabet’s capital expenditures reached about $51.4 billion in the quarter, roughly 40% of revenue, as the company pours money into data centers and artificial intelligence.
Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to about $30.7 billion, but the gain did little to offset concerns about search and cash flow. Alphabet reported quarterly revenue of $127.6 billion, slightly below expectations, with net income coming to about $26.2 billion. The losses are unrealized, meaning they exist only on paper unless the shares are sold.
A recovery in the stock would restore much of Brin’s wealth, but Thursday’s drop shows how quickly tech fortunes can shift.
Photo: Austin McKinley, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
