Ooooo, that's gotta smart... Folks, you may recall that last week we brought your attention to a Wired article which postulated that, given the current market climate as far as Microsoft's stock is concerned, it might not be long before Bill Gates was supplanted as the world's richest man by Oracle CEO (and Steve Jobs's bestest buddy) Larry Ellison. At the time, a mere $5.6 billion separated the two in the "filthy lucre" race, based on the number of shares of stock each man had in his own company, multiplied by the then-current stock price-- ORCL's been weathering the storm, while MSFT had just gotten the beatdown of a lifetime.

Actually, we take that back: Monday's savage beating may have been worse, relatively speaking, as Microsoft's stock got its butt kicked all over the trading floor. When the dust cleared, MSFT was down over twelve points-- while ORCL was up two. That prompted faithful viewer Carter Adler to ask us whether we could provide an update on Larry's push for the top spot. Well, just to keep an eye on the race, we cobbled together a little web applet that fetches the current MSFT and ORCL share prices, multiplies them by the number of shares held by Bill and Larry as reported by Wired, and reports back who's richer and by how much. (No, it's not publicly available yet, but we'll let you know when it is.) Guess what? At close of business on Monday, it told us that "Larry has $49.98 billion, Bill has $49.37 billion. Larry's richer by about $0.6129 billion."

Now, this is all rather simplistic, of course. In fact, some would call our "World's Richest Man" methodology downright sloppy. For one thing, it's absurd to think that Bill's and Larry's respective net worths are comprised entirely of each man's holding in his own company; odds are they've both got a few bucks they've forgotten in the pockets of their winter coats, a handful of change under the couch cushions, a coffee can full of pennies on the dresser, etc. And for another thing, just because Larry may now be richer than Bill, that doesn't mean that someone else isn't now richer than both of them. Still, we thought it was an interesting development.

Alas, the "official" numbers still show Bill in the lead. Carter reported back that "the CBS Evening News just announced that 'Larry Ellison is worth about 48 billion dollars, about a billion or so behind Gates.'" And the Today Show on NBC reported the Larry-Bill differential to be "a couple billion" following Monday's stock activity-- noting also that Bill had lost $35.5 billion on paper in the past month. So it sounds like Larry's got a little ways to go before he can claim the top spot, but there's no doubt that the "Redmond Justice" case-- engineered in part by buddy Steve, it's said-- has put him back in the running. (Update: at broadcast time, the Larry-Bill differential reported by our applet had risen to $1.35 billion in Larry's favor; maybe he'll be crowned officially later today...)