Who Is The World’s Second Richest Person?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 16, 12:13PM EDT

Quick Read

Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire at $1.27 trillion after SpaceX's IPO, with Larry Page ranking second at $324 billion.
Page and Brin each own 26% of Alphabet's (GOOG) B-class shares, mirroring dual-class control structures used by Meta (META) and others.
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Who Is The World’s Second Richest Person? — © Ralph Orlowski / Getty Images

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 | F Price Prediction) 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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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.