|
Not Quite Neck In Neck (4/25/00)
|
 
|
| | |
Seeing as we're currently mired solidly in the middle of what we can only assume is a pre-WWDC news drought, why don't we take another look at Larry Ellison's race to replace Bill Gates as the world's richest man? After all, money's a big ratings-getter-- more so when we're talking about billions. Just yesterday we told you that, based purely on our half-assed calculations of each man's stock holdings in his own company, Larry had edged Bill out of the top slot; in fact, Wired is now reporting the same thing. Sadly, though, when each guy's other holdings are taken into account, it seems that Bill's still pretty far out ahead.
On the plus side, we now have better numbers with which to make our calculations. Wired has graciously given us what is supposedly the exact share count of each man (Gates has 740,964,300 shares of MSFT and Larry has 689,706,050 shares of ORCL, in case you're keeping score at home). On top of that, the Associated Press gives some hints about each man's outside holdings; Gates apparently has about $10 billion in some form that isn't Microsoft stock (smart man), while Ellison's got a mere $200 million in property. Let's see, here... We pump those numbers into our calculations, and voilà! It seems that Bill's got around $62.5 billion compared to Larry's $53.2, so he's still up by about $9.3 billion. (And both guys are well ahead of the current third-place holder, Warren Buffett, who's got about $28 billion.)
So all we can say is, if Larry's serious about wrestling the title away from Bill, he's going to have to pray for another big MSFT tumble-- and one that doesn't take ORCL with it. Assuming Oracle's share price holds steady, it looks to us like Microsoft's stock would have to fall over twelve more points before Larry's overall net worth overtakes Bill's. Sound unlikely? Perhaps. But don't forget, "Redmond Justice" is a great catalyst, and the government's official recommendation on Microsoft's penalty is due this Friday. Depending on the results, we may see another panicked weekend after-hours sell-off. Larry's other chance is to get ORCL to shoot up over thirteen points, but frankly, we think the Microsoft deflation's a likelier event in the short term. Gosh, whoever knew that numbers could be so much fun?
| |
| |
 |
SceneLink (2252)
|  |
 |
|
And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
| | | |
|
| |
|
 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/25/00 episode: April 25, 2000: Don't be too hard on Bill Gates for publicly ridiculing the iMac; after all, he's obviously a very frightened man. Meanwhile, Larry Ellison's still second banana to Bill in the race to be the richest, but he's closing fast, and Woz takes a trip to Brown University to scope out the world's biggest Tetris game-- is he there on official Apple business?...
Other scenes from that episode: 2251: Does It Crash Faster, Too? (4/25/00) Bill, Bill, Bill... Is that fear we smell? We know that your recent "fireside chat" commercial was carefully engineered to draw attention to your "even billionaires shop at T.J. Maxx" sweater and away from the hunted look in your eyes, but even without the miracle of Smell-O-Vision, we still thought we detected a whiff of Eau de Deer in Headlights wafting from the direction of the TV... 2253: Bigger Is Better (4/25/00) Have you heard about this giant Tetris game that some students threw together over at Brown University? We first read about it over at MacRumors; according to an Associated Press article, these guys actually built a working, playable version of Tetris out of ten thousand Christmas lights...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
|
|
