Give user 1 status to someone else?
As others have said, the user account with ID equal to 1 is a special account: It is one of the default accounts created by Drupal during its installation, and it is the only account to which every permission is assigned. (See @Clive's answer.)

What can be done is changing the password, and the email associated with that account.

Create a file in the same directory containing index.php, and add the following code.

define('DRUPAL_ROOT', getcwd());
require_once DRUPAL_ROOT . '/includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

$account = user_load(1);
$edit = array(
  'pass' =&gt; 'New password';
  'mail' =&gt; 'New email';
);

user_save($account, $edit);


With this code, everybody with access to the filesystem of the server can change the password, and the email of the user #1. I am not suggesting to change the password directly in the database because the password in clear; Drupal saves the hash obtained from user_hash_password(), whenever user_hash_password() is the function implemented by Drupal, or from third-party modules.

If Drush is available, changing the password is even easier. Everybody could execute the following command:

drush user-password &lt;username&gt; --password="&lt;password&gt;"