The world’s richest people are tech founders and CEOs reaping major wealth gains from their businesses—and there’s one billionaire who just overtook Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos on the ultra-rich list, thanks to a new AI breakthrough.
Google cofounder Larry Page enjoyed a net worth surge of $6 billion this Wednesday, sending his fortune to $252 billion, after the debut of his business’ latest AI model: Gemini 3. The innovation—seen as an improvement from Gemini 2.5 released around eight months ago—ignited optimism from investors and analysts, causing Alphabet stock to jump 3%.
Gemini’s success shot Page, who owns about 6% of Google parent company Alphabet, up the Bloomberg Billionaires Index to third place. Meanwhile, Bezos was knocked down to the fourth wealthiest person in the world, thanks to recent Amazon-related plummets in his own wealth and Page’s simultaneous gains. Fellow Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who also owns 6% of Alphabet, ended Wednesday $5 billion richer and in fifth place on the ultra-rich list. In the days following the stock surge, their wealth has settled, with Page boasting $249 billion, Bezos owning $240 billion, and Brin with $233 billion.
Why Gemini 3 is the ‘favorite’ of analysts
Billionaires have witnessed their fortunes ascend and stumble in the AI revolution. The industry propelled Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison to briefly become the richest person in the world—even toppling Tesla CEO Elon Musk—before swiftly swiping $34 billion from his net worth, sliding him down to number two. Concerns of an AI bubble are growing, but experts argue the new Gemini model is the real deal.
Google explained that Gemini 3 has upped the ante on prompting; the model provides users with better quality answers to complex questions, without the need for thorough prompting to help the AI understand the context and intent behind their inquiries. The new model will also be integrated into Google’s search products, the Gemini app, and enterprise services.
Analysts at wealth management firm D.A. Davidson called Gemini 3 a “genuinely strong model,” even admitting that it’s their “favorite model generally available today.” They added the updated model is “the current state-of-the-art” based on their preliminary trial with the AI and how it scored against the tech’s benchmarks.
“We’d go as far to say that this latest model from [Google DeepMind] meaningfully moves the frontier forward, with capabilities that in certain areas far exceed what we’ve typically come to expect from this generation of frontier models,” the analysts wrote.
Other analysts are chiming in on Gemini 3’s success; Bank of America Securities analysts said that the new Google AI is “another positive step” for the business to close in on the “perceived LLM performance gap” against other AI challengers in the ring. This August, OpenAI rolled out its updated model GPT-5, while Anthropic’s Claude chatbot and Sonnet 4.5 have become more popular among users. However, BofA Securities analysts contend Gemini 3 is a worthy competitor.
“Healthy adoption metrics for AI Overviews and Gemini indicate Google is successfully funneling users into its AI surfaces, despite growing competition, and should help ease concerns around potential search disruption,” the analysts said. “While still early to assess the full capabilities of the new model, a few early reviews were positive.”
