Michael Dell has risen to fourth place on the Forbes real-time billionaires ranking, with a net worth of $276.4 billion as of 25 September. The gain moved the Dell Technologies founder past Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, reshuffling the upper reaches of the global wealth list and putting a hardware maker among a group long dominated by software and internet fortunes.
The jump was driven by a sharp rally in Dell Technologies shares, which had climbed about 345 percent since the start of the year. Dell added roughly $11 billion to his fortune on a single trading day, and his wealth was up about 94 percent for the year, from around $141 billion in January. Much of that gain came from his large personal stake in the company he founded in a university dorm room in the 1980s.
The rally reflects strong demand for the company’s artificial intelligence server infrastructure and a growing order backlog, as data center operators race to add computing capacity. Analysts at Morgan Stanley pointed to that demand in raising their outlook, and highlighted an increased probability of a bull-case share price target of $756, adding to investor confidence in the stock. The company has become a leading supplier of the servers used to run large models.
The reshuffle left Zuckerberg in sixth place at $257.2 billion, with Brin also slipping down the order. The moves show how concentrated the current wave of gains has been among a small group of technology owners whose companies supply the hardware and infrastructure behind the artificial intelligence buildout, rather than the consumer apps that drove earlier fortunes.
For a company once known mainly for consumer personal computers, the shift marks a striking turn, with Dell now positioned as a supplier of the machines that train and run large models. As long as demand for that hardware holds, his standing near the top of the global rich list looks likely to reflect the fortunes of the wider server market, which has swung sharply with sentiment about artificial intelligence spending. Rankings on the Forbes real-time list can shift quickly from day to day, because they track live changes in share prices rather than fixed annual estimates.
