Larry Ellison is closing in on Elon Musk for the title of the world’s richest person.
His fortune soared $US70 billion ($106 billion) after Oracle reported quarterly results after market close on Tuesday in New York that surpassed expectations, and said there’s more growth to come.
The increase lifted his total fortune to $US364 billion, within striking distance of Musk who sits at $US384 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. If Ellison’s gain remains when trading begins in New York on Wednesday morning [11:30pm AEST], it’ll be the biggest one-day increase ever recorded by the index.
Musk and Ellison, rivals for the title of the world’s richest person.
Musk became the world’s richest person for the first time in 2021 before losing the title to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. He reclaimed it last year and has now 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 more than 26 per cent in extended trading overnight after the company posted a major increase in bookings and gave an aggressive outlook for its cloud infrastructure business, stunning Wall Street and galvanising hopes that the post-ChatGPT global AI infrastructure build-out is accelerating. It’s the company’s largest single-day surge since 1999.
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Shares of Musk’s Tesla, by contrast, are down 14 per cent this year.
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.
