Elon Musk lost his title as the richest person in the world when he was overtaken by another tech billionaire.
It turns out that AI isn’t just coming for the jobs of ordinary folks - it can get to everyone.
That’s because the man who has taken over as the richest man on the planet is Larry Ellison, CEO of software company Oracle, which invests heavily in artificial intelligence - amongst other things.
Elon Musk was briefly overtaken by Larry Ellison
As ever, the race to be the richest person in the world is an ever-changing landscape, and could flip in an instant.
However, one thing we can be certain of is that Ellison managed to supplant Musk on Wednesday thanks to a boom in share price.
Oracle, the business software company where Ellison is the top dog, reported better than expected financial results, meaning that shares rose by around 40 percent in early trading, placing the software company’s value at around $960bn, and Ellison’s 41 percent personal stake in that company at $396bn, a measly few billion north of Musk’s own personal wealth of just $384bn.
Of course, this sort of money is utterly unimaginable for most people, but to these guys, it’s something of a game, and to be the richest person in the world must feel like a bit of a badge of honor.
There’s a list of big names behind Musk and Ellison
By the end of the day, things had flattened out a bit and Musk was back on top, as Ellison sat on $383bn.
Still, he increased his personal fortune by $90bn in just one day, so it can’t be too disappointing for him.
Tesla CEO Musk remains top of the tree despite that brief moment away from the summit, with Bloomberg reporting that he still has $384bn in the bank.
Sitting behind those top two are Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon supremo Jeff Bezos, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Behind Ellison’s sudden leap in wealth is the push into AI, as well as media and politics.
Oracle’s stock soared after announcing some big deals in cloud services and AI, including multi-billion dollar contracts with Nvidia and OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT.
In a statement, Oracle said: "Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers.”
The company added that the backlog of business will soon ‘exceed half-a-trillion dollars’.
It’s a purple patch for the entire Ellison family, as Larry’s son David recently took over Paramount Global - owners of CBS and MTV - in an $8bn deal.