Larry Ellison loses $27bn

NEWS Some of the tech sector's most affluent IT movers and shakers have been squeezed out of their slots in the Forbes top 400 Rich List. The biggest loser has to be Larry Ellison, who slipped from second place to fourth. The outspoken head of Oracle has had to watch his wealth almost halve over the last year from $58bn to $21bn. As if that pill isn't hard enough to swallow, Ellison has to put up with the fact that his arch-rival Bill Gates has remained clamped to his number one spot. While losing an estimated $9bn, Gates remains the richest person in the world for the eighth year running with a net worth of $54bn. As with many other companies and individual investors the plummeting fortune of the IT sector has affected the bank balances of Raymond Lane, one-time president and COO of Oracle. The diminishing value of tech stock over the past 18 months has taken its fair share of victims along the way. Other notables to slip out of the listing include Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor. David Wetherall, founder of internet incubator CMGI, has had to stomach a slump in the company's shares from a one time high of $163.22 to around $1.