Larry Page is Now World's Second Richest: his net worth, Sergey Brin's standing, and the never-ending game of rich-guy musical chairs
Another Billionaire Milestone Nobody Asked For
So, Larry Page, the Google guy, is officially the second-richest dude on the planet now. You heard that right. Not some scientist curing cancer, not the person who fixed our crumbling infrastructure, but Larry Page. He just leapfrogged Oracle's Larry Ellison – because apparently, there just ain't enough room for two Larrys at the top of the tech money mountain. Give me a break.
The Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List, bless its heart, has him clocked in at somewhere around $267.5 billion, maybe $272 billion if you catch him on a good Tuesday. It's a number so big it stops meaning anything, doesn't it? Like trying to count grains of sand on a beach. And the best part? His net worth jumped by a cool $8.7 billion in one day last Monday. My checking account doesn't see that kind of action in a decade, and honestly... it's just mind-boggling. The stock ticker probably looked like a rocket taking off, all green arrows and dollar signs for the folks already sitting on gold mines.
What's fueling this latest absurdity? Oh, you guessed it: AI. Always AI. Alphabet, the company Page co-founded back in '98 with Sergey Brin in some Stanford dorm room, has seen its shares rip almost 70% this year. Seventy percent! While the rest of us are still figuring out how to pay for groceries, these megacaps are just printing money. The big news that got investors all hot and bothered? Facebook-parent Meta is reportedly talking about using Google's AI chips – those Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs – in their data centers by 2027. And renting them from Google Cloud next year. It's a classic tech-bro move: one giant company pays another giant company billions for chips, and the founders' net worths go parabolic. You can almost hear the champagne corks popping in Mountain View, probably custom-engraved with "Gemini 3.0" on them.
The AI Gold Rush and the Silent Partner
Let's be real, this whole "AI swagger" thing is a gold rush, but the gold ain't trickling down to us. It's pooling at the very top. Google's new Gemini 3 model, apparently, is the "smartest chatbot" now, edging out ChatGPT in those oh-so-important industry benchmarks. Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is out there on X, hyping it up. When your rival's CEO is giving you free PR, you know you're doing something right, or at least, you've convinced enough people you are.
Page, he's been out of the CEO chair since 2019, even stepped down from Google's top spot way back in 2001. But who needs to run the show when you own a huge chunk of the company that's hitting a nearly $4 trillion market cap? He's the ultimate silent partner, just watching the numbers climb. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin, the other Google co-founder, is also doing pretty well, now the fourth-richest person, blowing past Jeff Bezos. But Brin's net worth, still a staggering $245.6 billion, is a bit less than Page's. Why? Because Brin's been busy donating hundreds of millions to non-profits and Parkinson's research. Imagine that – actually giving some of it away. It makes you wonder, doesn't it? What's the plan for all that extra cash, Larry? Are we just collecting it like some high score in a video game? Then again, maybe I'm just old-fashioned and think money should, you know, do something besides sit in a vault. This isn't just about money. No, scratch that, it's always about money.
I gotta say, it’s wild to think about. From a dorm room to owning a quarter-trillion dollars, all because you figured out how to organize the internet. My biggest invention in college was a way to cook ramen with a coffee maker, and nobody's offering me billions for that.
More Money, More Problems... for Us
So, Larry Page is now #2. Elon Musk is still #1, sitting on a frankly obscene $473.2 billion. These numbers are just getting silly. They're not even real anymore; they're digital artifacts, pixels on a screen representing unimaginable power and influence. While these guys are playing musical chairs with billions, swapping spots on some arbitrary list, the world outside keeps spinning, facing actual, tangible problems. Are we really supposed to cheer for this? To marvel at the sheer scale of it? Or are we allowed to feel a little bit of cynical exhaustion from watching the ultra-rich get ultra-richer, offcourse on the back of the latest tech hype cycle? My tangent for the day: I just wish my own meager stock portfolio would get an "AI boost" that didn't just mean a new subscription model for something I already paid for. It's always about the bottom line for them, never for us.