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- A grocery magnate turned robotics leader has had $9 billion wiped off his net worth this year.
- Rick Cohen ranks among the biggest wealth losers after a 41% drop in his personal fortune.
- His net worth has tanked due to an investor backlash against his AI-powered company, Symbotic.
A grocery tycoon turned robotics guru has had $9 billion wiped off his net worth after shares of his AI-powered company crashed, making him one of the world's biggest wealth losers this year.
Rick Cohen, 72, is the owner and executive chairman of C&S Wholesale Grocers, a food distributor founded by his grandfather. He's turned the family business into the eighth most-valuable private company in America with an estimated value of $35 billion, per Forbes.
Cohen is also the founder and CEO of Symbotic, which makes AI-enabled warehouse robots for customers including Walmart, and went public via special-purpose acquisition vehicle in the summer of 2022.
He was worth $21.4 billion at the start of January. That would put Cohen in 94th spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index all else being equal.
However, his wealth has plunged by 41% to $12.6 billion this year, pushing him down to 178th place. Only six people on Bloomberg's 500-strong list have suffered bigger hits to their wealth this year, and none rank lower than 77th on the index.
They include the world's third-richest person, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault (down $10.5 billion), L'Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (down $9.2 billion), and Arnault's archrival, Kering founder François Pinault (down $10.4 billion).
It's striking that Cohen has seen a steeper wealth drop than all but a handful of the uber-rich, three of whom are in the top 20 and all of whom have far more money to spare.
Cohen's wealth has tanked because the value of his family's roughly 70% stake in Symbotic has plummeted. The stock more than quadrupled last year, from about $12 to more than $50, on the back of the artificial-intelligence boom, and buzz over a contract to implement its robotics and software automation platform across all 42 of Walmart's regional distribution centers.
Symbotic shares have crashed by more than 60% this year to below $20 at Friday's close, slashing the company's value to below $10 billion.
The latest quarterly earnings revealed construction delays and implementation costs had squeezed profit margins, and spurred Cohen and his team to warn that fixing the issues might temporarily slow revenue growth.
Symbotic is also facing a class-action lawsuit claiming it misled the market about its near-term growth prospects and downplayed the risks it faced.
The clouded outlook likely explains why Symbotic is trading at a 17-month low, and why Cohen has suffered an extraordinary wealth wipeout this year.
Symbotic and Cohen didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider made outside normal working hours.