6 min read
Michael Dell's net worth hit $273.2 billion on 9 September 2026, per Forbes' real-time Billionaires tracker, pushing the Dell Technologies founder past Alphabet co-founder Larry Page to reach No. 2 on that list for the first time. Three days later, on 12 September 2026, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index had him at $262 billion, ranked 5th globally. Both figures are current, both are dated within the same week, and they disagree by roughly $11 billion, a reminder that "net worth" is a tracker's estimate, not a bank balance, even for a fortune built on a single, fully public stock.
Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires tracker, reported by Forbes staff writer Mary Roeloffs on 9 September 2026, showed Michael Dell's fortune climbing about $6.3 billion in a single day to $273.2 billion, enough to overtake Larry Page and reach No. 2 globally for the first time, behind only Elon Musk. Two days later, on 11 September 2026, Forbes' Antonio Pequeno IV reported Dell shares at an all-time high with Dell and Jeff Bezos "jockeying" for third place, putting Dell's fortune near $274 billion.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index tells a related but distinct story. As of 12 September 2026, Bloomberg ranked Dell 5th globally at $262 billion, noting he has added $101 billion to his fortune in 2026 alone, the second-largest gain of the year behind only Musk's roughly $249 billion. Forbes and Bloomberg agree on the direction and the scale of the move; they disagree on the exact number and the exact rank, which is the normal state of affairs for this series rather than a red flag on either publisher.
| Date | Publisher | Figure | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 September 2026 | Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | $273.2 billion | No. 2 globally |
| 11 September 2026 | Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | ~$274 billion | Jockeying for No. 3 with Jeff Bezos |
| 12 September 2026 | Bloomberg Billionaires Index | $262 billion | No. 5 globally |
Dell took the company he founded in his University of Texas dorm room in 1984 private in 2013, then returned it to public markets in 2018 through a reverse merger with the VMware tracking stock, a deal that later produced a $1 billion shareholder settlement (below). Today he chairs Dell Technologies (DELL) and, per the company's 2026 proxy statement, controls roughly 40% of it, including 31 million shares held in a trust for his wife, Susan Dell. Bloomberg's index also credits him with a large stake in Broadcom Inc. (AVGO), a separate holding that adds to the total but is not the source of this month's swing. Neither DELL nor AVGO appears in NetWort's curated ticker universe, checked against frontend/scripts/curated-tickers.mjs and backend/app/services/asset_symbol_service.py, so both are mentioned here by name and ticker only, with no internal asset links.
The mechanism is a single stock, not a basket of holdings or a family conglomerate: Dell Technologies shares have gained roughly 300 to 327% since the start of 2026, when they traded around $128, driven by surging demand for the high-performance servers and storage systems that power AI data centers. Forbes had already flagged the pattern on 29 May 2026, when a single record trading day added $35 billion to Dell's fortune and moved him past Mark Zuckerberg into 6th place; the September move past Larry Page is the same mechanism compounding further, not a new one. Because the entire gain sits in one exchange-listed stock with a public price, this is one of the more transparent wealth swings this series has covered. It also means the number can fall just as fast as it rose if AI infrastructure demand cools, which neither Forbes nor Bloomberg predicts, only tracks.
A single, fully public, exchange-listed stock should be the easiest kind of fortune to price, and in one sense it is: nobody disputes Dell Technologies' share count or its closing price on any given day. What Forbes and Bloomberg disagree on is everything layered on top of that price, exactly which shares and trusts count as Dell's, how his Broadcom stake and other holdings are weighted, and how each service times its daily snapshot against a stock that has been unusually volatile all year. That is the same shape of disagreement this series found with Jensen Huang's Nvidia fortune, where the gap came from a beneficial-ownership definition rather than a hidden asset, not the opacity that widens the gap for a privately held conglomerate like Sukanto Tanoto's Royal Golden Eagle.
Two trackers, one underlying stock, an $11 billion gap in the same week: that gap is a measurement difference, not a change in what Michael Dell actually owns, and it is worth remembering before treating any single real-time "richest person" ranking as a settled fact. For more on how this series handles trackers disagreeing on a fully transparent, publicly traded fortune, see: