Larry Ellison, Oracle’s 81-year-old co-founder and chairman, recorded one of the largest single-day increases in personal wealth in history, with his net worth jumping by more than 100 billion dollars after the company posted blockbuster earnings, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. The surge lifted his fortune to around 393 billion dollars, edging him past Elon Musk’s 385 billion. It reflected both Oracle’s soaring share price and Ellison’s enormous stake in the company, more than 1.1 billion shares, or about 41 per cent of its equity.
Long known as a database giant, Oracle has reinvented itself as a backbone provider for the artificial intelligence era. It reported 14.9 billion dollars in quarterly revenue, up 12 per cent from a year earlier, with its cloud infrastructure business growing 55 per cent. The bigger headline was in future bookings: the company announced 455 billion dollars in remaining performance obligations, essentially contracts for future revenue, a 359 per cent jump on the year. Chief executive Safra Catz called it “an astonishing quarter” and projected that cloud revenues could reach 144 billion dollars a year by 2030.
Oracle has positioned itself as a key supplier of the vast computing power needed to train and run AI systems, striking deals with the likes of OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD and ByteDance, and even Musk’s own AI start-up, xAI. With OpenAI alone requiring gigawatts of capacity, that role places Oracle in direct competition with cloud leaders Amazon, Microsoft and Google, while making it one of the most closely watched names in the AI supply chain.
Ellison’s leap came as Musk’s grip on the top spot loosened. Tesla shares fell about 14 per cent over the year amid slowing electric-vehicle demand and rising competition, and while the carmaker has proposed a new pay package for Musk tied to ambitious targets through 2035, shareholder approval is still pending. For a time, that left the world’s richest title within Ellison’s reach. Behind the two men, the top of the list included Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Bernard Arnault, Jensen Huang and Warren Buffett.
Ellison’s record gain points to a shift in where technology wealth is being made. While much of the public attention has focused on AI applications such as chatbots, the largest sums are flowing into infrastructure, the data centres, chips and cloud platforms that power those tools. Oracle’s rise suggests that being the picks-and-shovels provider in the AI gold rush can be more lucrative than building the applications themselves.
