Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison suddenly dethroned Tesla CEO Elon Musk Wednesday as the world’s richest person after stock in Ellison’s database software company surged by more than 40% amid rosy projections for its AI-fueled future.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Ellison’s net worth, which is tied to Oracle, skyrocketed to $393 billion Wednesday — a one-day, $101 billion leap that vaulted him past Musk ($385 billion).
But who is Ellison, and how did he get so rich to begin with? Here’s a quick explainer.
Who is Larry Ellison?
Ellison, 81, was born in 1944 to an unwed mother who gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption; he did not meet his biological mother again until he was 44.
Ellison attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the University of Chicago, where he first encountered computer design. He moved to Berkeley, Calif., before graduating; his goal was to become a computer programmer.
In 1977, Ellison cofounded Oracle in Santa Clara, Calif.; the company eventually came to dominate the database software industry (and later, cloud computing). As of Wednesday, Oracle ranked as the fourth-largest software company in the world after Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet (Google), with a market cap of more than $922 billion.
In the 1990s, Ellison emerged as “a public figure known as much for his lavish lifestyle as for the database company behind his fortune,” according to the BBC; he has dabbled in aviation, restaurants, farming, tennis, yachting and movies.
In April, the New York Times described Ellison as “the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time,” noting that he “spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.”
More recently, Ellison has positioned himself as an ally of President Trump, appearing at the White House in January for the announcement of a project called Stargate, which will build data centers for artificial intelligence. Ellison also funded the bulk of his son David’s $8 billion bid to buy Paramount earlier this year, approved by the Federal Communications Commission under Trump. The president has said he would like Ellison to purchase TikTok too.
According to the New York Times, Ellison’s ambition now “appears” to be “nothing less” than bringing “the country under the benevolent sway of artificial intelligence, which he has said will bring about an era of bounty and harmony” — a vision that includes installing “cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by AI” and “combining thousands of databases into one enormous electronic repository, which can be mined by AI” to “cure diseases and fix everything else,” as the Times put it.
“I think this will make for a happier citizenry,” Ellison recently told former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Ellison served as Oracle’s chief executive until 2014 and remains the company’s chairman and chief technology officer.
Why did Ellison’s wealth skyrocket this week?
On Tuesday, Oracle reported its quarterly earnings — and even though the latest numbers came in slightly below Wall Street’s expectations, at $14.9 billion, the software giant projected that its future AI-fueled cloud revenue would jump to $144 billion by the 2030 fiscal year on the back of major deals with “the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta and many others,” as CEO Safra Catz said in a call with investors.
That’s a massive jump from the company’s projection for the current fiscal year: less than $20 billion.
“We expect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year — and then increase to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion over the subsequent four years,” Catz explained in a statement.
“There’s no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up,” one Wall Street analyst gushed on the earnings call.
According to Yahoo Finance, Oracle has been pouring billions into its AI ambitions by investing in data centers — effectively “securing a massive amount of Nvidia’s coveted GPUs (graphics processing units, or AI chips) and renting out that computing power” in a push to “rival” peers such as Amazon and Alphabet.
At the same time, the company has also “laid off workers and reportedly discussed eliminating cash raises and bonuses for employees this year.”
“It was an astonishing quarter — and demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure continues to build,” Catz said in her statement, adding that the company plans to sign up several more multibillion-dollar customers in the coming months.
Can Musk catch up?
Musk held the title of the world’s richest person for nearly a year, with his net worth peaking at $486 billion last December. But his wealth declined significantly in early 2025, as his work for the Trump administration weighed heavily on his companies — most notably Tesla.
Last week, Tesla announced that Musk could receive an unprecedented pay package worth more than $1 trillion if he meets some ambitious targets over the next decade, including expanding Tesla’s nascent robotaxi business and growing the company’s market value to at least $8.5 trillion.