Oracle's shift into an AI infrastructure titan has propelled Larry Ellison past Elon Musk, earning him the title of the globe's richest individual. The 81-year-old database pioneer's net worth soared by over $100 billion after the company's earnings report on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg calculations, making it the largest one-day surge ever documented by its Billionaire's Index.
Ellison, who owns approximately 41% of the Oracle company with 1.16 billion shares, now estimates his fortune worth $393 billion if Oracle's stock price maintains its current figures, outdoing Tesla CEO Elon Musk's net worth of $385 billion.
The notable increase in wealth followed Oracle's impressive quarter announcement, where they signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts and scheduled $455 billion in future cloud infrastructure earnings. Oracle's market capitalization swelled to around $950 billion during Wednesday's intraday trading, gaining over $270 billion in a single day.
Ellison surpassed Musk's record for the largest single-day increase in net worth - $63 billion, set in December 2024. Oracle reported a 12% YoY increase in quarterly revenue of $14.9 billion, with cloud infrastructure revenue leaping 55% to $3.3 billion. The company projects its cloud infrastructure revenue to hit $18 billion this fiscal year.
Shifting from a conventional database provider, Oracle has now established itself as a critical player, supplying the infrastructure for AI companies in the fiercely competitive race for computing power.
Despite Musk starting 2025 with a net worth of $420 billion, fluctuating Tesla shares and growing competition in the electric vehicle market have led his wealth to decrease to around $385 billion. Contrastingly, Ellison's record-breaking surge is part of a broader narrative of how AI infrastructure is reshaping the tech industry's financial landscape, with the real profits in AI perhaps not lying in creating autonomic vehicles or chatbots, but in supplying the computing infrastructure these technologies necessitate.