Larry Page is the World's Second-Richest Man: What's His Net Worth, Who He Beat, and Why the Hell Are We Still Tracking This?

Larry Page, the guy who co-founded Google, just vaulted past Larry Ellison to become the world’s second-richest person. Yeah, you heard that right. Second. Only Elon Musk is still ahead, clinging to that top spot like a barnacle to a tanker. And what's fueling this absurd jump? You guessed it: AI. The buzzword that’s become a license to print money, apparently.

Honestly, it’s enough to make you wanna scream. Or maybe just throw your phone at the nearest wall. I mean, here we are, watching gas prices tick up again, trying to figure out how to pay rent, and these dudes are adding billions to their already obscene fortunes in a single day. A single day! While I was trying to figure out if I could afford that extra shot of espresso, Larry Page's net worth jumped by $8.7 billion. No, wait, some reports say it was almost $15 billion in one session. Pick a number, folks, it's all Monopoly money to us anyway.

The AI Gold Rush: Same Old Story, New Shiny Wrapper

So, Alphabet, the behemoth that owns Google, saw its stock absolutely explode. We're talking 5.8% up on Monday, after an 8.4% rally last week. It’s now worth more than Microsoft, for crying out loud. The reason? "AI momentum." Specifically, their Gemini 3 model is apparently the new golden child, supposedly "edging past ChatGPT." Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is out there on X, cheerleading for Gemini. When a rival CEO starts hyping your product for free, investors tend to notice. And buy. A lot.

It’s like the dot-com bubble all over again, but this time, instead of "e-commerce," it's "AI." Everyone's scrambling for a piece of the pie, convinced this is the next big thing that’ll change everything. And maybe it will, offcourse. But let's be real, the only thing it's definitively changing right now is the Forbes Real Time Billionaires list. The rest of us are still waiting for our robot overlords to deliver world peace or, at the very least, cheaper groceries.

What does it even mean for a stock to have "AI swagger"? Does it walk into the trading floor with a leather jacket and sunglasses? Does it lean against the ticker tape looking cool? This whole thing feels less like genuine innovation and more like a high-stakes poker game where the house always wins. And the house, in this case, is owned by guys like Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Brin, by the way, also got a nice bump, now sitting pretty at fourth-richest, pushing Jeff Bezos down a notch. Poor Jeff, he’ll have to make do with a mere $235.1 billion. My heart bleeds for him, truly.

And then there's Larry Ellison. The dude was the second person to hit $400 billion this year, and now he's slipped to third, his fortune shrinking by a few billion because Oracle's shares took a dive. Oh, the humanity! Losing a few billion is like finding a penny in your couch cushions for these guys, but for us, it's a headline. It's almost comical, isn't it? The sheer scale of wealth being shuffled around, like a high-stakes game of musical chairs, only with private jets and superyachts instead of actual chairs.

The Unseen Hands Behind the Digital Curtain

So, who is Larry Page? He's the guy who co-founded Google in 1998 with Sergey Brin. He used to be CEO of Alphabet, then he "vacated the CEO office" in 2019. But don't you dare think he's out of the game. He remained a massive stakeholder, which is why his wealth has gone from $50.9 billion in 2020 to $144 billion at the start of this year, and now, boom, over a quarter-trillion. Larry Page Passes Larry Ellison Becoming World’s Second-Richest

This isn't about working harder; it's about owning the infrastructure. It's about being the landlord in the biggest digital city on Earth. And now, thanks to reports that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms is talking about using Google's AI chips and renting space from Google Cloud, that landlord just got a whole lot richer. It’s a classic move: sell the shovels during the gold rush. Google's selling the shovels, the land, and probably the water too.

My big question, and seriously, I want an answer: are we just supposed to accept this as the natural order of things? That a handful of people can accumulate wealth on a scale that defies comprehension, while the rest of us are told to be grateful for a 2% raise? It’s not just a wealth gap; it’s a chasm. It’s like watching someone build a skyscraper out of solid gold while you’re trying to patch a leaky roof with duct tape. Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here, expecting some semblance of... well, equity. This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of economic disparity, disguised as progress.

And what about all the talk of Alphabet Inc hitting a $4 trillion market capitalization? It’s a number so big it loses all meaning. It’s just pixels on a screen, a testament to how much we've collectively decided these platforms are worth. But worth to whom? To the guy whose net worth jumped by billions in a day, or to the millions of people who rely on Google every single day, often for free, without seeing a dime of that astronomical growth?

The Billionaire Shuffle: Who Cares?

Look, congratulations to Larry Page for becoming the second-richest person on the planet. I guess. But honestly, for most of us, it’s just another reminder of how rigged the game is. We’re not playing on the same field, we're not even in the same stadium. We're outside, watching the highlights on our phones, probably powered by their tech, while they're inside counting their chips. It's a never-ending cycle of tech giants getting richer, off the back of everyone else's data and digital labor. And ain't that the truth.