Larry Ellison became over $110 billion richer on Wednesday, a day after Oracle
Those projections sent Oracle’s stock price flying, up more than 40% on Wednesday, lifting Ellison’s net worth to about $391 billion. The total puts Ellison closer to dethroning Elon Musk as the world’s wealthiest individual. Forbes says Musk, CEO of automaker Tesla
Ellison, 81, remains active in Oracle as chief technology officer and chairman. Rather than gradually sell off his position in the database software maker, he has maintained it, holding more than 1.1 million shares for over 25 years. His disciple Marc Benioff, who runs sales management software company Salesforce
In 2022, Ellison stepped down from the Tesla board after almost four years, but he’s been keeping busy ever since.
He has sharpened his focus on the health care industry with Oracle’s $28 billion acquisition of Cerner in 2022, he ramped up his philanthropy with the launch of the Ellison Institute of Technology at the University of Oxford in December and he helped complete the $8 billion Paramount Global-Skydance merger last month. Ellison has also become an arms dealer for artificial intelligence infrastructure, most significantly allying Oracle with ChatGPT provider OpenAI.
On Tuesday, Oracle said that its remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, now stood at $455 billion, up 359% from last year. Oracle also said that its cloud infrastructure revenue stands to jump from $10 billion in the most recent fiscal year to $144 billion in fiscal 2030.
“Clearly, we had an amazing start to the year because Oracle has become the go-to place for AI workloads,” Ellison said at the beginning of Oracle’s earnings call on Tuesday, during which analysts competed to toss the highest compliments at him and CEO Safra Catz. “We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, MetaNvidiaAMD
Meanwhile, Oracle has continued to grow in the sales of standard software.
“And by the way, we’re much bigger than WorkdayServiceNow
Ellison has long been a supporter of President Donald Trump, donating to his campaigns and helping him raise outside money. The relationship offers a potential business benefit to the Oracle co-founder.
Trump has been delaying the sale of TikTok’s U.S. business, and said in January that he’d be open to ByteDance selling that business to Musk, who previously worked for the administration, or to Ellison.