Last year's position : 42

A move back up the charts two places for the maverick software chief who likes to spend some of his $18bn fortune on his dream of winning the America's Cup sailing trophy. Dominated the headlines this summer with Oracle's hostile PeopleSoft takeover bid and the panel felt his consolidation message of "y'all bought too many databases" hits the spot in times of frugal IT budgets. Has also started pushing the grid computing concept and is banking on a nice big contract from the UK government should it need a few databases for its controversial ID card project.