Who Is The World’s Second Richest Person?

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After SpaceX’s (NASDAQ: SPCX) IPO, Elon Musk’s net worth rose to $1.27 billion, making him the first trillionaire in world history (at least as far as most people know, based on inflation-adjusted dollars). His net worth has risen to $653 billion this year. That increase alone is larger than the net worth of the second-richest person in the world.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google (which is part of Alphabet today), is in second place by total net worth. His figure is $324 billion, up $45 billion this year. His Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, is close behind in third place with a net worth of $292 billion, up $42 billion this year.

Page’s ownership is part of an unusual arrangement. He holds about 3% of Alphabet but owns 26% of the B-class shares. Brin owns the other 26% of these, which gives the two men voting control of the company. This “dual class” arrangement is used by other public companies, including Ford (NYSE: F) and Meta (NASDAQ: META). As a matter of fact, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg owns 98% of the company’s voting stock.

At Alphabet, the board of directors is nearly worthless because it cannot outvote Brin and Page together.

Alphabet is the world’s second most valuable company based on market cap at $4.48 trillion, behind leader Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), which sits at $5.16 trillion.

In some way, Page’s net worth is probably because he turned the company over to professional management. Eric Schmidt was CEO from 2001 to 2011 and then Executive Chairman from 2011 to 2015. Today, Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Alphabet and its subsidiary, Google.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998 (Nvidia was founded in 1993). NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang is worth $176 billion, which puts him in 8th place among the world’s richest people

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