Larry Ellison has become the world’s richest person for the first time, ending Elon Musk’s nearly year-long reign in the top spot.
Ellison’s fortune soared by $US101 billion ($153 billion) after Oracle shares surged on Wall Street, after the technology giant reported quarterly results that surpassed expectations and said there’s more growth to come.
Elon Musk and Larry Ellison are the two richest people on the planet.
The increase lifted his total fortune to $US393 billion, ahead of Musk who sits at $US385 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It’s the biggest one-day increase ever recorded by the index.
Musk became the world’s richest person for the first time in 2021 before losing the title to Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. He reclaimed it last year and had held it for just over 300 days.
Ellison, 81, who co-founded Oracle and is now chairman and chief technology officer, has the bulk of his net worth tied up in the database software company.
Oracle’s shares, which had already gained 45 per cent this year through Tuesday’s close, soared 41 per cent in early trade after the company posted a major increase in bookings and gave an aggressive outlook for its cloud infrastructure business. It’s the company’s largest single-day surge ever.
Shares of Tesla, by contrast, are down 13 per cent this year. The company’s board has proposed a massive pay package for Musk that, if he succeeds in meeting a series of ambitious targets, could make him the world’s first trillionaire.
Oracle’s bullish forecast highlights the need for global AI developers to keep accelerating their investments – its customer OpenAI alone estimates it will require trillions of dollars over time to spend on the infrastructure required to develop and run its services. Oracle is emerging as a key provider of such computing capacity, competing against cloud leaders Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
While known for its database software, Oracle has recently found success in the competitive cloud computing market. Earlier this year, it signed a deal with ChatGPT operator OpenAI for 4.5 gigawatts’ worth of data centre capacity – enough energy to power millions of US homes. It also counts companies such as Nvidia and ByteDance’s TikTok as major cloud customers.
