Elon Musk briefly lost his ‘world’s richest person’ title to Oracle’s Larry Ellison

In a stunning few minutes after markets opened on Wednesday, stock in Larry Ellison’s Oracle Corp. rocketed more than a third, enough for him to temporarily wrest the title of the ‘wealthiest person in the world’ from its longtime holder, Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

But the stock market is fickle, and Musk was back on top by the end of the day, according to Bloomberg, as the software giant gave up some 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 (€328.57bn) versus roughly $383.2bn (€327.71bn) for Ellison.

The duelling fortunes are so big that 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 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.