NVIDIA promised them very happy being the best-positioned AI chip manufacturer. At least it was until Google started manufacturing chips. This new scenario has excited investors, who have rushed to Buy Alphabet shares, causing its Price to rise by up to 6.3% from one day to the next, and accumulating an advance of more than 75% since its August price.
This increase in the value of Google’s parent company has also coincided with a dip in Oracle’s valuation, which has caused chaos on the podium of the world’s largest fortunes according to Forbes.
What AI gives you, AI takes away. A few months ago, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, stood as the second largest fortune in the world, overtaking Mark Zuckerberg. His fortune reached 291.6 billion thanks to the good growth prospects posed by the construction of data centers for AI. In fact, the Oracle founder’s fortune grew so much that he was close enough to the unattainable Elon Musk to threaten his position on that list.
In the same way that AI raised Larry Ellison to become the second largest fortune in the world, AI has taken that place from him to give it to Larry Page, who reaches that position with a fortune of 261.5 billion dollars.
Google rises, Oracle falls. Google’s stock market rally contrasts with the downturn suffered by the main architect of the cloud infrastructure in which AI lives, dropping up to 6.79% of its price in recent days. This decline has meant that Ellison’s fortune, with a strong influence of Oracle on its income balance, has suffered, falling to $256.7 billion, being displaced to third position.
That same Google stock market momentum has taken another founding partner, Sergei Brin, to fourth position, with a fortune of $242.4 billion, while Alphabet shares brought the company closer to a market capitalization of almost $4 trillion.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos didn’t even see it coming. The most pronounced falls in recent months have been those of Jeff Bezos and, above all, Mark Zuckerberg, who, accustomed to remaining in the Top 3 of the greatest fortunes, fall to fifth and sixth position in the ranking of Forbes.
The decline in Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune is especially striking, due to the poor performance of Meta’s shares in recent weeks. Curiously, Meta shares have broken their downward trend following Google’s announcement to get into the AI semiconductor business and rumors that Zuckerberg could change NVIDIA processors for the Tensor Processing Unit manufactured by Alphabet.
Larry Page and Sergei Brin: same company, different fortunes. Although Page and Brin co-founded Google and share control of the company through their shares, both millionaires do not own exactly the same number of shares, and that detail makes a big difference in their assets. According to Alphabet’s public statements before the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), between the two magnates they concentrate 87.9% of Alphabet’s class B shares, which grant 10 votes per share.
However, the figures show that Page has just over 389 million shares, while Brin has about 362.7 million of these shares, making Page the main beneficiary of the rally in the shares of the company they founded.
Brin has been more generous with science. The key to this gap is that Sergei Brin has been much more active than Page in donating and selling part of his stake in Alphabet, and that has reduced his share package over time.
Brin has allocated large volumes of Alphabet and Tesla shares to donations for research into treatment for Parkinson’s disease, bipolar disorder and autism, after a genetic mutation was discovered that made him prone to developing that disease.
In WorldOfSoftware | Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google and became millionaires. Now they are dedicated to collecting gigantic airplanes
Imagen | Flickr (Fortune Global Forum, TED Conference)
