The richest man in the Bay Area—at least, as decreed by Forbes—doesn’t technically live in the region anymore.
Forbes dropped its latest iteration of The Forbes 400 list Wednesday—its annual who’s who of the wealthiest people in the country. Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk ($251B), Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos ($161B) and Oracle chairman Larry Ellison ($158B) top the list, with Ellison named the richest man in the Bay Area.
Tech moguls dominate Forbes’ ranking of the richest people in the Bay Area. Ranking behind Ellison on the Forbes list are fellow centibillionaires, Google co-founders Larry Page ($114B) and Sergey Brin ($110B) and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ($106B).
Other local members of the elite list include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang ($40.7B), former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ($20B) and Laurene Powell Jobs ($13.4B). Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr ($10.2B) ranked as the wealthiest venture capitalist in the country.
Ellison is listed by Forbes as a resident of Woodside, the wealthy Bay Area enclave that also counts the likes of Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob as homeowners.
That doesn’t capture the full story: Ellison owns a stately 23-acre estate in Woodside, replete with a koi pond, a manmade lake and a tea house. But Ellison no longer counts the house, which was inspired by a Japanese emperor’s palace, as his primary residence despite having spent nearly a decade and tens of millions of dollars to renovate the place. (He also got millions back in property taxes in 2008 after appealing the assessed value of the estate.)
In 2020, Ellison moved to Lanai—the island he bought a 98% stake in eight years prior. According to reporting from Puck, he is also registered to vote with no party preference in Hawaii. Ellison also has homes in San Francisco, Malibu, Lake Tahoe and Kyoto, Japan, among other locales.
The argument that Ellison is a Bay Area resident on account of Oracle also doesn’t hold much water. Despite maintaining four offices across the Bay Area and being a longtime Bay Area fixture, its headquarters are now in Austin. Oracle officially moved its headquarters just a few days before Ellison announced his move to Lanai.
All this is to say: Ellison may have made his wealth here, but he took it elsewhere, not entirely unlike Musk, the man who currently tops the list. A representative from Forbes did not respond to a request for comment.