Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and tech chief, has seen his net worth drop by $49 billion in 2026, marking the largest wealth decline among major tech executives this year. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Ellison’s fortune fell from $247 billion at the start of January to $199 billion by Wednesday’s close, driven by a sharp sell-off in software stocks. A 5% decline in Oracle’s share price on Wednesday alone erased roughly $9 billion from his personal wealth. The broader market selloff was triggered by the release of new AI tools from Anthropic, including plugins for its Claude Cowork AI agent. Designed to automate tasks in legal, sales, finance, marketing, and data analysis, these tools have raised concerns that corporations may rely less on traditional enterprise software providers. As a result, shares of major software companies—including Adobe, Salesforce, Intuit, and Atlassian—plunged earlier in the week. While some rebounded on Wednesday, the damage had already been done, with investors reassessing the long-term demand for legacy software platforms. Ellison was among several top tech leaders hit hard by the market shift. Elon Musk’s net worth dropped by about $11 billion, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg lost $8 billion, and Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang each saw their fortunes shrink by around $5 billion, as their companies’ stocks fell by at least 2%. Oracle has aggressively positioned itself at the center of the AI revolution, forging strategic partnerships with industry leaders like Nvidia and OpenAI. The company is investing heavily in data centers and infrastructure to support AI workloads, betting that it can become a dominant force in the AI hardware and cloud space. However, this expansion has come at a cost. Oracle’s debt levels have risen sharply, and its financial strategy has drawn criticism. As of November 30, the company’s “remaining performance obligations”—contracts already signed but not yet recognized as revenue—jumped 438% year over year to $523 billion, nearly ten times its $53 billion in annual revenue from the prior fiscal year. Michael Burry, the investor known for his short bet against the housing market in “The Big Short,” has turned his attention to Oracle. In a recent post, he criticized the company’s aggressive spending and mounting debt, calling the moves unnecessary and potentially driven by ego. “Oracle didn’t need to do this,” Burry wrote. “It had a great business. I do not like how it is positioned or the investments it is making.”