Elon Musk joked on social media on Saturday about being a “(former) trillionaire” after losing around US$130 billion over five trading days, weeks after becoming the first person to exceed billionaire status. Concurrently, the wealth of executives at ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s leading memory chip maker, 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). Analysts noted that much of the wealth held by tech tycoons in both the US and China is paper wealth, highly volatile. Liu Shengjun, chief of the China Financial Reform Institute, stated that stocks move in natural cycles and that today’s tech magnates create societal wealth through intelligence and innovation. Fourteen CXMT directors, senior executives, core technical personnel, and close relatives hold just over 2 billion shares indirectly. Chairman Zhu Yiming and president Cao Kanyu hold shares valued at nearly 80 billion yuan (US$11.8 billion) and over 10 billion yuan, respectively. Separately, Tang Jie, founder and CTO of Chinese AI firm Z.ai (Zhipu), is worth about HK$35.8 billion (US$4.6 billion) based on the Monday closing price of its stock, which listed in Hong Kong in January.