Elon Musk briefly toppled as world’s richest person after rival’s $135 billion windfall

Larry Ellison briefly surpassed Elon Musk to become the world’s richest person after a jump in Oracle shares added a record amount to his fortune.

Ellison’s wealth soared $US89 billion ($135 billion) after Oracle reported quarterly results that surpassed analysts’ expectations and said there’s more growth to come.

The increase lifted his total net worth to $US383.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It’s the biggest one-day increase ever recorded, and put him ahead of Musk for much of the day before the Tesla CEO edged back into pole position by $US1 billion.

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 after dropping out of college 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 by Tuesday’s close, surged 36 per cent on Wednesday 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 gain since 1992, and also added $US97 million to chief executive Safra Catz’s net worth.

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.

Such deals helped boost remaining performance obligations – a measure of bookings – to $US455 billion at the end of the fiscal first quarter, Oracle said. That’s more than four times higher than the same period a year earlier.

Recent and coming bookings will translate to a rapidly expanding cloud infrastructure business over the years ahead, Oracle chief executive Catz said. That unit will expand 77 per cent to $US18 billion this year and reach $US144 billion in annual revenue by the year ending in May 2030, she said.

“It was an astonishing quarter,” Catz said.

Bloomberg

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