Adam Foroughi Net Worth 2026: How AppLovin's Crash Cost Him $13.5B

Quick answer

Adam Foroughi's net worth is $11.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as of late September 2026 — ranking him roughly 317th among the world's billionaires. It is an extraordinary number. It is also barely half of what it was nine months earlier. At the end of 2025, Bloomberg put his fortune at $25.1 billion, meaning Foroughi has lost $13.5 billion — nearly 54% — in 2026 alone.

The cause is brutally simple: he owns around 11% of AppLovin, the AI-powered advertising company he co-founded in 2012 and runs as CEO, and the stock has been one of the worst performers in the S&P 500 this year, down 53.8% year-to-date. His wealth is essentially one stock, and that stock is having its worst year since the company went public.

How the fortune breaks down

Foroughi's wealth has an unusually simple structure. Per Bloomberg's wealth analysis, roughly 99% of his net worth is tied to his AppLovin holding — about 11% of the company's shares, including high-voting Class B stock that gives him effective control. The rest is a rounding error: cash from small insider sales and whatever he has earned in salary. For a fuller account of how he built that stake, start with the founding story — but the short version is that he refused to dilute.

This concentration is the whole story of both his rise and his fall. When AppLovin's market value surged past $100 billion and briefly toward $160 billion in the AI advertising boom, Foroughi went from under $1 billion to $27.3 billion in about two years. When the stock gave up 53.8% in 2026, $13.5 billion evaporated just as fast. Diversification is for other billionaires; Foroughi bet everything on his own company and kept it that way.

Bloomberg vs Forbes: what the trackers say

The two major wealth trackers agree on the direction and roughly on the scale, though their snapshots are taken on different days and the stock moves daily. Bloomberg's late-September 2026 reading: $11.6 billion, rank 317. Forbes' real-time tracker, as of October 5, 2026, shows $10.4 billion and rank 354 — a few weeks of further stock weakness explains the gap. Forbes' annual 2026 list (compiled March 10, 2026) had him at $15.8 billion, when the stock was already well into its slide.

Because his fortune is almost entirely one listed stock, Foroughi's net worth is the most transparent of any billionaire in the index — there is no opaque private-company valuation to argue about. Multiply his disclosed share count by the market price and you get the number. That is why the trackers rarely disagree by more than a few percent, and why every percentage point of AppLovin's move shifts his fortune by more than $100 million.

The rise: from under $1B to $27.3B in two years

The ascent was one of the most violent wealth creations of the AI era. Parts of 2023 found Foroughi worth less than $1 billion as the stock languished. Then came AXON 2.0, AppLovin's AI advertising engine, which Bloomberg credited with a 2024 stock surge that gained roughly 519% — outpacing even Nvidia and Palantir that year. Revenue growth reaccelerated, margins held above 45%, and by December 2025 Bloomberg had him at $27.3 billion.

Consider the timeline of the turnaround. At the April 2021 IPO, priced at $70 a share with a $24 billion valuation, his stake was worth roughly $2 billion. By early 2025, after the company divested its mobile-games business to focus purely on advertising, the market treated AppLovin as a pure-play AI company, and the multiple expanded dramatically. At one point in 2026, AppLovin carried a market cap near $160 billion with $5.48 billion in revenue and an almost absurd $10 million of EBITDA per employee.

The 2026 crash: 53.8% down, third-worst in the S&P 500

The fall began with short-seller reports in 2025 that questioned the sustainability of AppLovin's growth narrative, and it accelerated through 2026 as investors rotated out of high-multiple ad-tech names. By late September, the stock was down 53.8% year-to-date — the third-worst performance of any S&P 500 constituent — and Foroughi had lost $13.5 billion, the sixth-largest dollar loss of any billionaire in 2026. (For scale, Bernard Arnault and Larry Ellison lost more in dollars; almost nobody lost more in percentage terms.)

The market's complaint is a familiar one for AI-era growth stocks: extraordinary numbers priced for perfection, and then a "show-me story" phase when growth normalizes. Analysts still debate whether AXON's edge is durable or whether the AI ad boom simply pulled demand forward. Either way, the stock's multiple compressed hard — and with a beta that makes it swing harder than the market in both directions, the damage to Foroughi's single-asset fortune was disproportionate.

One-stock risk: the most concentrated fortune in tech

Most tech billionaires have diversified at least partially by now — selling shares on schedules, funding side ventures, building family offices. Foroughi has not. His insider sales are tiny: SEC filings show him selling roughly $1.9 million worth of stock on March 12, 2026, at prices around $452–$453 a share — routine, small-lot sales that barely dent a double-digit-billion position. Compare that to his $13 million in total 2025 compensation, itself a rounding error next to the stake.

This is a philosophical position as much as a financial one. Foroughi famously bootstrapped AppLovin after venture capitalists turned him down, raising a $280 million leveraged loan in 2018 rather than diluting his ownership, and taking a $400 million KKR investment the same year on his terms. He holds the stock because he believes the company is worth more than the market pays. In 2026, that belief cost him $13.5 billion on paper. Whether it was conviction or stubbornness will be decided by where the stock trades in 2027.

What could rebuild it

The bull case for a recovery is not mysterious — it is the same story that built the fortune, minus the multiple. AppLovin is now a pure advertising-technology company after the $400 million sale of its mobile-games business to Tripledot, which closed June 30, 2025 and added a ~20% equity stake in Tripledot to AppLovin's balance sheet. The company is pushing AXON beyond mobile gaming into e-commerce advertising, a market many times larger than its original niche.

The numbers that made believers are still there: 2024 revenue above $4.7 billion with net margins over 45%, $5.48 billion in trailing revenue by the time of his April 2026 20VC interview, and that surreal $10 million of EBITDA per employee. If e-commerce proves to be a second growth leg, the 53.8% drawdown will look like a dip. If not, Foroughi has demonstrated he will not sell his way out — he will ride it to the bottom or back up, all-in, the same way he has run everything since 2012.

How the numbers are calculated

Unlike many billionaire fortunes, there is almost no estimation involved here. Foroughi's disclosed AppLovin shareholding, multiplied by the live stock price, plus small adjustments for cash and salary, is the number. Both Bloomberg and Forbes do exactly this, which is why their figures move in lockstep with the stock and why they agree within a few percent on any given week. The flip side: his net worth is the most volatile on the billionaire list, because it is the most honest — a live mark-to-market of a single company, updated every trading day.

Frequently asked questions