World’s richest person alive? Musk and Ellison are fighting over the title

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, briefly lost his position as the world's richest person to Larry Ellison, co-founder and CTO at Oracle this week, before reclaiming the title by the end of the trading day.

Ellison's fortune rose to $393 billion on September 10, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after Oracle shares climbed more than 40 percent. 

The surge reflected investor confidence in the company's cloud infrastructure and a string of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) deals. By the close of trading, some of those gains had receded, placing Musk back ahead with $385 billion.

Elon Musk remains the world's richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a total net worth of $384 billion as of 11 September 2025. He is followed closely by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose fortune stands at $383 billion.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg holds third place with $264 billion, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ranks fourth with $252 billion. Google co-founder Larry Page sits in fifth position with $210 billion.

Further down the list, Berkshire Hathaway chairperson Warren Buffett ranks eleventh with a net worth of $148 billion. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is currently in fifteenth place with $120 billion, Bloomberg's index shows.

Elon Musk, who has held the top spot for nearly a year, has seen Tesla shares falter amid investor unease over the Trump administration's rollback of electric vehicle (EV) policies and consumer backlash linked to his political statements. His long-term wealth trajectory could be bolstered by a proposed pay package from Tesla worth more than $1 trillion if he meets a series of ambitious targets.

Larry Ellison, 81, co-founded Oracle in 1977 and has remained a dominant figure in the technology sector. Now chairman and chief technology officer, he has positioned himself as an ally to President Donald Trump, appearing earlier this year alongside OpenAI's Sam Altman and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son to unveil a major US-based AI infrastructure project called Stargate.

Oracle's earnings report this week projected revenue from its cloud operations to increase by 77 percent this year to $18 billion, showing the growing demand for data centres from AI companies.