With Ripple's XRP coin hitting a high of $3.84, the company's co-founder and executive chairman, Chris Larsen, is now worth about $59.9 billion on paper, CNBC reported.
According to Forbes, Larsen has 5.19 billion of XRP and a 17 percent stake in Ripple.
That puts Larsen just ahead of Larry Ellison, who ranks fifth on the Forbes 400 list with a worth of $58.4 billion, and ahead of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who rank eighth and 10th on the list, respectively.
Current Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse owns a 6.3% stake in Ripple, according to a source at the company, and owns additional XRP tokens. He has a net worth of at least $9.5 billion. That would land him at around 54 on the list, with the addition of Larsen, just two slots below Charles Schwab.
A third person who’s gotten rich on XRP is Ripple cofounder Jed McCaleb, who left the company in 2013 and later came to an agreement with Ripple over the XRP he owns. McCaleb said he donated 2 billion XRP to a donor-advised fund. The remaining 5.3 billion XRP as of February 2016 are in a custody account at Ripple and are meted out to him on a monthly basis.
XRP skyrocketed in 2017 from $0.006 on January 1 to $2.30 on December 31 — a return of 38,000%. After a 36,018 percent gain in 2017, Ripple continued its crazy run at the beginning of 2018.