The Battle of the Titled Technocrats: A Forgotten Villain’s Glorious, Bubbly Return

4 minutes read time

In a week filled with political assassinations, global diplomatic meltdowns, and the looming threat of a wider war, the American financial markets, in their infinite and unfeeling wisdom, turned their attention to the only question that truly matters: which emotionally stunted billionaire gets to wear the imaginary crown? The answer, for a glorious and deeply stupid 40 minutes on Wednesday morning, was a name that sent a thousand SEO-driven journalists scrambling to their keyboards: Larry Ellison. Yes, that Larry Ellison. In a stunning reversal of fortune, the co-founder of Oracle—a man best known for a ruthless history of corporate espionage, owning a Hawaiian island, and a cameo in Iron Man 2—briefly unseated his buddy and rival Elroy Muskrat as the World’s Richest Man, a title so obscene it defies comprehension.

The event was a perfect, diamond-hard encapsulation of our current moment of late-stage capitalism: a forgotten titan’s absurd re-emergence, fueled by a politically-connected AI bubble, that resulted in a meaningless battle for a meaningless title, all while the market blissfully ignored the actual tragedies unfolding in the real world.

The sheer comedy began with the headlines. “Who is Oracle’s Larry Ellison?” they screamed, as if the man were some long-lost prospector who had just stumbled out of the wilderness with gold in his pockets. This is a man who flies his own military jets, races yachts, and cycles through vacation homes like they’re seasonal throw pillows. The idea that a new generation needed a Wikipedia-style explainer for a figure of such cartoonish, Bond-villain-level extravagance is a hilarious testament to the fleeting nature of tech celebrity. One minute you’re the most despised man in Silicon Valley; a couple of decades later, you’re a historical footnote until an AI hype-cycle accidentally makes you king.

The catalyst for this glorious resurrection was, of course, Artificial Intelligence. Oracle, a company so “ancient” by tech standards that it’s just a few years younger than Muskrat himself, saw its stock surge 36%—its best day since 1992—on the news of AI-fueled cloud contracts. “AI Changes Everything,” Ellison proclaimed, and for one shining morning, it certainly changed his net worth, which shot up by over $100 billion in about the time it takes to watch an episode of a sitcom. The rally screamed “dot-com bubble,” a party Oracle knows all too well, having seen its stock collapse by 80% when the last one burst. But in a market completely detached from reality—one that shrugged off the assassination of a major political figure to set a new record high—who cares about history?

The real beauty of the moment, however, was in the delicious comeuppance for the incumbent, Elroy Muskrat. While Ellison was riding the politically-connected wave—announcing a massive $500 billion datacenter project at the White House—Muskrat was being hoisted by his own political petard. The AP reported that Tesla’s sales have been plunging across Europe after he took to his own social media platform to endorse far-right politicians, and his market share in the U.S. is eroding as buyers recoil from his embrace of Felonious Punk. It is a tale of two billionaires: one’s fortune is soaring because of his proximity to power, while the other’s is faltering for the very same reason.

In the end, the stock market, in its infinite fickleness, gave back some of Oracle’s gains, and by the end of the day, Muskrat was back on top, the natural order of the universe restored. The difference between them was a mere billion dollars, a rounding error so vast that it could, as one analysis noted, fund the entire population of Florida for a year so they could all quit their jobs. The battle for bragging rights was a temporary draw. But perhaps the most perfect and pathetic summary of this entire, insipid saga came not from a market analyst, but from Muskrat himself. Asked on a recent podcast who the smartest person he’d ever met was, he offered a simple, almost grudging compliment to his rival: “Larry Ellison is very smart. I will say Larry Ellison is one of the smartest people.” After all the sound and fury, all the yacht racing and island buying and world-bestriding ego, it all ends with two bros talking about how smart they are. The rest of us are just lucky to be here to witness it.