The battle among billionaires for bragging rights as the world’s richest person got heated on Wednesday with the surprising surge of an old contender: Larry Ellison.
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In a stunning few minutes after markets opened, stock in Ellison’s Oracle rocketed more than a third, enough for him to temporarily wrest the title from its long-time 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, according to Bloomberg, as Oracle gave up a bit of its earlier gains.
For those keeping score, the difference now is a billion, which is not much given the size of the figures: Musk’s US$384.2 billion versus US$383.2 billion for Ellison.
The duelling fortunes are so big each could fund the lifestyles of 5 million typical US 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 holiday for a year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product.
The brief switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle powered by multibillion-dollar orders from customers as the artificial intelligence race heats up.