Billionaires Index: How Elon Musk lost #1 for one day
On September 10, 2025, headlines of ‘Elon Musk loses top spot as the world’s richest person’ made the rounds: but only for a few hours.
10:10 AM ET, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison overtook him on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025 (a daily ranking that updates in real time). By 4:00 PM ET, when markets closed, Musk had already clawed his way back to the top.
For nearly three years, Musk has frequently held the crown. Yet both LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have taken the top spot for long stretches (weeks or even months) whenever Tesla stumbled or their own shares surged.
But what set September 10 apart was the unprecedented speed:
Larry Ellison’s surge lasted only a matter of hours, but it was enough to vault him past Musk. That whiplash wasn’t a quirk of timing. It was proof of how forceful the market reaction to market news really was, and how quickly a single trading day, shaped by trader emotions, can redraw the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025.
The power of Anchoring Bias
What do emotions have to do with individuals swapping places on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025?
In a word: Anchoring.
Anchoring Bias is when the first number you see becomes the frame through which everything else is judged, even if the fuller picture says otherwise.
On September 10, traders responded to the earnings report of Oracle, a company helmed by Elison, and reacted to one figure that dominated the narrative. That single Anchor was enough to send Oracle’s stock soaring, and briefly push Larry Ellison past Elon Musk as the world’s richest man on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025.
The result? Elon Musk loses the top spot.
Navigating the market
Anchoring Bias explains why traders reacted the way they did.
But to understand why Elison’s Oracle had that kind of pull, we need to step back and look at the company itself.
What is Oracle?
While Tesla is consumer-facing and often grabs headlines, keeps hospital, bank, and government systems running quietly in the background.
Oracle is a US tech giant founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison. Its breakthrough product was the Oracle Database, system software launched in 1979, which today remains central for governments, banks, telecoms, and hospitals worldwide.
Oracle didn’t stay a database company for long. Each decade added new strands that expanded its reach:
1989: Launched Oracle Financials, a suite of accounting tools for managing ledgers and payments.
1990s: Expanded into HR and supply-chain modules, covering payroll, logistics, and manufacturing.
1998: Released the first Relationship Management (CRM) product, giving businesses tools to track customers and sales.
2001: Launched E-Business Suite 11i, the first integrated platform combining finance, HR, supply chain, and customer management.
2007: Released E-Business Suite R12, refining that integration and cementing Oracle as core enterprise infrastructure.
Today, it competes with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in cloud computing (renting servers and storage online, scaling up or down as needed) through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), launched in October 2016.
At the same time, Oracle continues to earn steady income from its core business software (databases, ERP, HR, and CRM) that still run much of global commerce.
Oracle spotlight moments
Oracle is no stranger to the spotlight.
Its 1986 stock market debut was one of the decade’s biggest software Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), putting Oracle firmly on Wall Street’s map.
In September 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, its stock hit nearly $47 a share on record profits and soaring database demand. That surge lifted Larry Ellison’s fortune to almost $60 billion, just a few billion short of Bill Gates.
A decade later in January 2010, its $7.4B takeover of Sun Microsystems gave Oracle control of Java, one of the world’s most widely used programming languages, cementing its power in enterprise tech.
Oracle’s surge explained
But September 9, 2025, marked something different.
An hour after markets closed at 5:00 pm ET, Oracle announced results that stunned Wall Street:
Four multi-billion-dollar contracts signed with three major multinational clients.
Oracle raised its forecast for OCI revenue to $18B for the year, up from $10B the year before.
Remaining Performance Obligations (future revenue already locked in by contracts) surging to $455B, up 359% year-on-year.
Cloud infrastructure revenue up 55% to $3.3B.
When trading opened on September 10, investors rushed in.
Oracle’s stock jumped more than 30% in the first trading hour of September 10, hitting an intraday high of $357 by midday. This rally pushed co-founder Larry Ellison’s net worth to $393 billion, overtaking and resulting in headlines like ‘Elon Musk loses top spot as the world’s richest person’.
Why Ellison’s fortune moves with Oracle
On September 10, 2025, those who trade Tesla stocks saw they closed at $347.79 a share, whilst Oracle closed at $328.33. The numbers were close, with Oracle actually being lower than Tesla. But what was really at stake here wasn’t the sticker price of a single share. It was the fortunes of their founders.
Larry Ellison’s wealth rises almost point-for-point with Oracle because he still owns about 40% of its stock. Meanwhile, due to a diversified portfolio, Elon Musk loses the top spot. He only owns 15.73% of Tesla at the time of writing, with his net worth being spread across Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and Twitter/X.
In comparison, Ellison’s concentrated stake means that when Oracle’s stock jumped more than 30% on 10 September 2025, Ellison’s net worth surged almost in lockstep, briefly overtaking Elon Musk at $393 billion in the process.
Mastering the behaviour
Ellison’s concentrated stake explains why his fortune rose sharply. But it doesn’t explain the surge itself: more than 30% in a single day.
To see that, we have to look beyond the balance sheet and into trading psychology.
Investors didn’t weigh every detail evenly. They seized on one headline figure (Oracle’s $455B backlog) and let it frame the entire story.
That first impression became the Anchor, pulling the market narrative around it.
This is the essence of Anchoring Bias.
What is Anchoring Bias?
Anchoring Bias is when the first number or headline you see becomes your reference point, and your brain doesn’t adjust enough as new facts arrive. In markets, traders often latch onto a big figure (an earnings beat, a backlog total, a flashy forecast), and then under-adjust, even when later data complicates the story.
That’s exactly what played out with Oracle.
Investors locked onto its $455B backlog and blockbuster AI contracts, treating those headlines as the Anchor.
In the process, they overlooked that Oracle actually missed total revenue expectations by $110M. The Anchor of future growth simply overpowered the less exciting reality of the earnings miss.
Difference to Recency Bias
At first glance, the Anchoring Bias may seem like another cognitive bias we explored in our previous article. However, Anchoring Bias isn’t the same as the Recency Bias, though both come from giving one detail too much weight.
Anchoring Bias makes the first impression stick.
Recency Bias lets the last impression dominate.
In that sense, they’re antithetical. One locks you at the start, the other at the end.
What are the elements of Anchoring Bias?
Anchoring Bias is built on four core elements:
First number fixation
The first number or headline you see becomes your Anchor.
It sets the reference point, even if it’s incomplete, and everything after gets judged against it.
For Oracle, that Anchor was the $455B backlog splashed across headlines.
Under-adjustment
Even when new data comes in, the brain doesn’t shift enough away from the Anchor. Traders end up making only small tweaks instead of fully recalibrating to reality.
Investors barely adjusted when Oracle also reported a $110M revenue miss: the backlog still dominated the story.
Confirmation loop
Once Anchored, you notice and emphasize information that supports the first number, while downplaying anything that challenges it.
The Anchor feels ‘proven’, even when it isn’t.
Analysts praised Oracle’s AI contracts and growth forecasts, reinforcing the positive Anchor while sidelining weaker fundamentals.
Stress amplifier
In high-pressure markets, stress makes Anchoring stronger.
Instead of questioning the first number, traders cling to it more tightly as a psychological safety net.
With AI driving the 2025 market narrative, stress and FOMO made traders hold onto the backlog headline even harder.
ANCHOR BIAS CASE STUDY: Gold’s all-time high (2025)
The Anchor Bias isn’t confined to just earnings calls or the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025. It also shows up in broader markets, where a single economic headline can set the tone and overpower everything that follows.
On 5 September 2025, the US Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) report dropped a shock: just 22,000 new jobs, far below the 150,000 forecast. Unemployment ticked up to 4.3%, and past reports were revised lower.
The first number traders saw (that huge miss) became the Anchor.
Markets instantly framed the economy as weakening, even before weighing revisions or broader trends. Gold, the classic safe haven, surged throughout the day. By September 8, it hit a record $3,673.95/oz.
Yet the fuller picture was softer, not catastrophic.
Unemployment edged up to 4.3% from 4.1%, a total of 0.2 percentage points, as prior months were revised down by 30,000 jobs each. Taken together, the revisions suggested a steady slowdown, not a major crash.
But traders barely noticed.
Anchoring Bias made the initial shock outweigh the quieter details, driving an exaggerated flight to safety.
Difference to Oracle
Unlike Oracle, where investors anchored to a record $455B backlog and blockbuster AI deals, Gold’s all-time high rally wasn’t about optimism: it was about fear.
In Oracle’s case, the Anchor was growth potential.
In Gold’s, it was weakness in jobs.
Both show how a single number can overshadow the bigger picture, but they pull psychology in opposite directions: one toward opportunity, the other toward safety.
Conquering the cognitive
If Anchoring Bias pulls traders into clinging to one number, how do you avoid Anchoring Bias once it takes hold?
The solution comes from an unexpected source: the military.
In the 1960s and 70s, during the height of the Cold War, US commanders ran war-games where one team played the enemy, exposing weaknesses in strategy before they could be exploited.
Traders can apply the same mindset today to uncover blind spots before the market moves against you.
That method is known as Red Teaming.
What is Red Teaming?
The idea is simple: become your own opponent.
Instead of Anchoring to the first number or headline, you deliberately challenge your own thinking before the market does.
For traders, that means three things:
Flip your view
Attack your logic
Stress-test scenarios
What does this mean?
If you’re bullish, build the bearish case, and vice versa. Ask yourself, ‘If this fails, what did I miss?’. Treat your trade like a rival would, by finding every weakness.
Winning wisdom wrap up
The lesson goes beyond Larry Ellison or whenever Elon Musk loses the top spot.
What unfolded was about how traders process information.
Anchoring Bias made one figure, Oracle’s $455B backlog, outweigh everything else. That fixation drove a rally strong enough to dethrone Musk, if only for a few hours.
The takeaway?
Markets run on psychology, and the Anchoring Bias is an especially powerful bias.
Spot the Anchor.
Question it.
And you see the full story before the crowd does.
Final thoughts
By market close on September 10, Oracle shares settled at $328.33: still up 36%, marking its biggest one-day gain in decades. That kind of move hadn’t been seen since 1992.
In the weeks that followed, the stock naturally pulled back. By September 25, it sat at about $291.33, showing that markets were digesting the rally, not dismissing it.
For a company long perceived as enterprise plumbing, that day was more than a headline: it showed that Oracle’s cloud pivot wasn’t just talk. It startled the market.
Whether this strength holds will depend on whether future data reaffirms the optimism or reveals the gaps traders overlooked in their rush to anchor.
Disclaimer:
Please note that the information provided in this article was accurate at the time of writing. Market conditions and economic data can change rapidly. This content is intended for informational purposes only and should not be used as the sole basis for making financial decisions.
On September 10, 2025, headlines of ‘Elon Musk loses top spot as the world’s richest person’ made the rounds: but only for a few hours.
At 10:10 AM ET, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison overtook him on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025 (a daily ranking that updates in real time). By 4:00 PM ET, when markets closed, Musk had already clawed his way back to the top.
For nearly three years, Musk has frequently held the crown. Yet both LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have taken the top spot for long stretches (weeks or even months) whenever Tesla stumbled or their own shares surged.
But what set September 10 apart was the unprecedented speed:
Larry Ellison’s surge lasted only a matter of hours, but it was enough to vault him past Musk. That whiplash wasn’t a quirk of timing. It was proof of how forceful the market reaction to market news really was, and how quickly a single trading day, shaped by trader emotions, can redraw the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025.
The power of Anchoring Bias
What do emotions have to do with individuals swapping places on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025?
In a word: Anchoring.
Anchoring Bias is when the first number you see becomes the frame through which everything else is judged, even if the fuller picture says otherwise.
On September 10, traders responded to the earnings report of Oracle, a company helmed by Elison, and reacted to one figure that dominated the narrative. That single Anchor was enough to send Oracle’s stock soaring, and briefly push Larry Ellison past Elon Musk as the world’s richest man on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in September 2025.
The result? Elon Musk loses the top spot.
