A CEO, who already held the No 5 spot on Forbes’ September 2026 edition of its ‘Top 10 Richest People in the World’ rankings, climbed to the No 2 spot on Wednesday morning (US time), marking his first time reaching such a high position. Forbes reported his staggering fortune surge hours after he acquired the title of the third-richest person. That billionaire businessman is Michael Dell, the chairman and chief executive of Dell Technologies, one of the world’s largest technology infrastructure companies.
Michael Dell’s sudden net worth surge
At first, the Dell Technologies CEO clinched the landmark milestone of claiming the third-wealthiest person title on Tuesday by dethroning Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The following day, his net worth climbed 2% Wednesday morning, as he overtook Alphabet co-founder Larry Page, recording an estimated valuation of a whopping $273.2 billion, according to Forbes’ September 9 report. This development put him just behind Elon Musk, who briefly became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO in June.
On Thursday, Forbes estimated the high-profile Donald Trump ally’s net worth to be $911.6 billion. The gap between the world’s No 1 and No 2 billionaires was still shockingly vast. And yet, the reshuffling of ranks on Wednesday put Dell above Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
However, Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list, last updated Sep 10, 2026, 02:25 am EDT, showed that Michael Dell had slipped back to the No 4 spot, with an estimated net worth of $267.5 billion. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index, on the other hand, still showed him at the No 5 position with an estimated valuation of $254 billion, behind Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin (in that order).
What powered Dell’s net worth jump on Wednesday?
According to his official Forbes profile, much of Michael Dell’s fortune is linked to his private investment firm DFO Management, which holds stakes in hotels and invests in liquid corporate credit. Additionally, the billionaire chief executive owns a massive multi-billion-dollar stake in Broadcom. Like Dell, this California-based company supplying a wide range of semiconductors and infrastructure solutions has since tapped into AI acceleration.
The real-time net worth tracker also noted that he personally owns about 40% of Dell Technologies’ shares, which grew 4% Wednesday morning. The dramatic jump helped it reach its record high level of $555.31. Wednesday’s rising shares ultimately propelled the company’s top executive’s net worth upward a little over 2%, adding $6.3 billion more to his wealth pool.
The University of Texas at Austin alum founded the company in 1984 when he was just 19-years-old and still a student. As a univeristy freshman, he initally founded a PC startup with $1,000 and “a game-changing vision for how technology should be designed, manufactured and sold,” according to the Dell website.
He dropped out of the US institution after his first year. Despite taking up pre-med there to fulfill his parents’ desires, Dell eventually made the conscious choice of devoting all his time to growing the business.
His company, which initially took off as a personal computer maker, has since embraced the artificial intelligence boom and transformed into a primary hardware provider for the advancing technology, further triggering the rise of Dell’s stock price.
Since the year started, Dell Tech has posted record revenue, with shares jumping 327% from their initial $128 mark, according to Forbes.
Forbes also ranks both Michael and his wife, Susan Dell, among the most philanthropic people in the world, granting them the No 16 spot on ‘America’s Top 25 Philanthropists’ list, updated in August. His most recent acts of generous donations included committing $750 million to fund a brand-new hospital and research campus at his alma mater.
Why did Dell Tech’s stock rally on Wednesday?
The stock rally was directly influenced by investors’ anticipation of CEO Michael Dell’s scheduled appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, where he will be taking the stage as the speaker. According to Investing.com’s report, markets are waiting for him to shed light on how the company is building its AI infrastructure pipeline.
The conference, in turn, comes shortly after Dell reported its FY27’s second-quarter earnings report on September 1, posting a record revenue of $47 billion, up 58% year-over-year.
Moreover, Dell reported $60.9 billion in AI-related orders and $16.4 billion in AI revenue.