Elon Musk dethroned as world's richest man -- for about four hours

The battle among billionaires for bragging rights as the world’s richest person got heated Wednesday with the surprising surge of an old contender: Larry Ellison.

In a stunning few minutes after markets opened, stock in Ellison’s Oracle Corp. rocketed more than a third, enough for him to temporarily wrest the title from its longtime holder Elon Musk and hand it to the software giant’s co-founder.

But the stock market is fickle, and Musk was back on top by the end of the day, at least according to Bloomberg, as Oracle gave up a bit of its earlier gains.

For those keeping score, the difference now is a billion, which isn’t much given the size of the figures: Musk’s $384.2 billion versus $383.2 billion for Ellison.

The dueling fortunes are so big each could fund the lifestyles of 5 million typical American families for a year, about the entire population of Florida, allowing them to all quit their jobs. Or they could just tell all of South Africa to take a vacation for year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product.

Musk became the world’s richest person for the first time four years ago. A big reason is his stake in electric car maker, Tesla. Musk also controls several private companies, including rocket maker SpaceX, his artificial intelligence company xAI, the Boring Company and the former Twitter, now called X.

Ellison owns about 40% of Oracle, which means its surging stock added $100 billion to his net worth in little over a half-hour after the stock market opened.

Ellison’s surge in wealth Wednesday morning reflected investor expectations that computers will take over many jobs now done by humans — and Oracle will benefit.

Or as the 81-year-old said on the call, “AI Changes Everything.”



(AP Photo Evan Vucci)