Maybe the animal spirits need to be leashed.

The tariffs announced by President Donald Trump last week have tanked global stock markets, hitting the world's richest the hardest.

Billionaires, including big supporters of Trump, have seen their net worths and investment portfolios plummet during the market sell-off.

Hedge fund managers such as Third Point's Dan Loeb and Pershing Square's Bill Ackman have criticized the tariffs, with Ackman pushing on X for a 90-day pause.

Months after saying that people worried about the economic impacts of tariffs should "get over it," JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in his annual letter published Monday that "America First is fine, as long as it doesn't end up being America alone" and that tariffs would slow the economy down.

Stanley Druckenmiller, a billionaire whom Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent worked under, said on X in November that his former employee "is innovative in a calm, thoughtful way that will be disruptive but not rattle markets." On Sunday, as recession predictions became commonplace among economists, Druckenmiller made clear he differed from his former protégé, writing that he did not "support tariffs exceeding 10%."

A pair of Republican billionaires named Ken — Langone and Griffin, the founders of Home Depot and Citadel, respectively — have expressed frustration with the rollout.

Langone told the Financial Times that he didn't "understand the goddamn formula" used to create the specific rates for each country, while Griffin — whose vaunted flagship fund has lost money in the past two months — called them a "huge policy mistake" in a talk Monday night at the University of Miami.

Stanley Druckenmiller is considered one of the best macro investors in the world. Getty Images/ Scott Olson

The reversal of opinion from the world's wealthiest is no shock. Then-President Joe Biden, for example, enjoyed the support of big names on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley before the relationship soured, thanks in part to the policies and focuses of then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler and then-Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

Trump himself has veered between love and hate with the elite of his hometown during his decade of political power, with the most recent lull paling in comparison to how companies and donors fled from him following the January 6, 2021, insurrection four years ago.

But this feels different because, according to six investors trying (and mostly failing) to trade these markets, they're all powerless. A company's fundamentals do not matter now, only whatever comes out of Washington, which led to one trader saying they're "getting my face ripped off" by their short bet on Tuesday.

This person's bet backfired because the market briefly spiked on a false rumor of a reprieve from the tariffs. The White House denied any pause was coming, with Trump instead threatening even higher tariffs against China, which has shown no sign of yielding.

The Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily, wrote on Sunday that "the more pressure we get, the stronger we become," and some investors are starting to bet on the Asian country over the US.

Speaking on "Liberation Day" at a conference put on by the technology lobbying group Information Technology Industry Council, David McCormick, the junior senator from Pennsylvania and onetime CEO of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, said he had spoken with many in his old line of work who are "long China and short America."

Following the release of the Chinese artificial intelligence darling DeepSeek's models in January, McCormick, a Republican who's married to the former Trump advisor and Goldman Sachs alum Dina Powell, said some of the so-called smart money is betting on the US losing the AI race — but he isn't.

"I'm long America, and I'm short China," he said, "but it depends on what we do. It's in our hands, and we can mess it up."

Emmalyse Brownstein contributed reporting.