President Trump’s second inauguration in a chilly Washington seemed a cause for celebration among Silicon Valley’s elite.
The leading lights of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and Tesla—all dubbed the “Magnificent Seven”—were prominently seated, lured by the president’s promise of deregulation and fresh merger opportunities.
Yet, barely 50 days later, the total market valuation of these seven technology heavyweights has plunged by around $2.7 trillion. The catalyst has been an unsettling combination of recession concerns, fuelled by Trump’s aggressive trade policies, a raft of government job cuts, and underwhelming economic data that revealed weaker-than-expected US job growth in February.
On Monday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed down by 4 per cent in its biggest single-day drop since March 2020’s “Black Monday”, when the pandemic sent global markets into freefall. Until recently, investors had spoken freely of a “Trump put”—the assumption that the White House would step in to stem steep market losses—but those hopes are now fading, leaving the sector on shaky ground.
The fallout has been particularly harsh for some billionaire founders. Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin have seen their collective wealth dive by more than $170 billion since the start of the year, according to a Bloomberg analysis. One notable exception is Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta Platforms boss, who has gained just over $4 billion in personal fortune during the same period.
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