#2 Larry Page

Larry Page co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998 out of a Stanford PhD research project on ranking web pages by their link structure (PageRank, which he co-authored and which lends the algorithm its name). He served as Google's CEO twice — from founding until 2001, and again from 2011 to 2015, when he became CEO of Alphabet, the holding company created to structurally separate Google's core search/ads business from its more speculative ventures (self-driving cars, life sciences, and others). He stepped down as Alphabet CEO in 2019 but remains a board member and controlling shareholder.

Most of his fortune is Alphabet stock, supplemented by a dual-class share structure (along with Brin and Eric Schmidt) that has preserved outsized voting control relative to economic ownership even as their percentage of shares outstanding has declined over two decades.