AI Boom Reshuffles World's Richest: Larry Ellison Briefly Surpasses Jeff Bezos

Oracle's Larry Ellison briefly tops Jeff Bezos to become world's second-richest person

Ellison's net worth reached $208.4 billion shortly after the market open, then fell to $199 billion, according to Forbes' real-time billionaires list. Bezos, who has claimed the title of world's second-richest person on and off over the years, is worth $205 billion. Only Tesla CEO Elon Musk, at $252 billion, is currently above him. Oracle shares gained 1.2% to $163.38 on Friday after the database vendor bumped up its fiscal 2026 revenue guidance and issued a rosy forecast as far out as fiscal 2029. The company issued the forward-looking revenue figures at its annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas. The stock rallied 11% on Tuesday after the company reported quarterly results that topped expectations. Oracle shares continue to reach new highs and are now up about 56% this year, behind only AI chipmaker Nvidia (up 139%) among large-cap tech stocks. Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977, has been the biggest beneficiary of the boom. He owns about 40% of the outstanding stock, making him the company's biggest stakeholder. His company's revival in recent year has been sparked by its improving position in cloud infrastructure and growing adoption of its cloud databases. Bezos, 60, and Ellison, 80, are jockeying for the title of world's second-richest person three days after their companies forged a new partnership. On Monday, Oracle said its database software will become available for AWS customers to use atop Oracle hardware sitting inside of Amazon data centers. In the past year, Oracle has also forged similar partnerships with Microsoft and Google, the other two leading cloud infrastructure companies. Ellison told analysts on this week's earnings call that Oracle is now in prime position in the cloud and in traditional data centers. "With Oracle Database to be able to run AWS, Microsoft and Google, is incredibly important," Ellison said on the call. "It will absolutely accelerate database growth in the public cloud. But we expect that private clouds will greatly outnumber public clouds as companies decide they don't want - they want the Oracle Cloud behind their firewall, in their datacenter, with no neighbors."

Bill Gates Falls In Billionaire Rankings Thanks To Red-Hot AI Stock Outpacing Microsoft - Oracle (NYSE:ORCL)

A billionaire tied to a technology company outperforming Microsoft passed Gates. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, once the world's richest person, remains one of the wealthiest individuals globally. However, a skyrocketing stock tied to another billionaire has pushed Gates further down the list of the world's billionaires. What Happened: The earnings report from Oracle Corporation ORCL was one of the top financial stories of the week, and shares being up over 10% on the week have given one billionaire more reasons to celebrate. Larry Ellison is the co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle. The billionaire owns around 40% of the company today, which makes up the majority of his wealth. Oracle's soaring stock price has boosted Larry Ellison's wealth, pushing him ahead of Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index. Ellison is now worth $168 billion, gaining $45.1 billion in wealth year-to-date in 2024. Gates, for comparison, is worth $158 billion, and has gained $17.2 billion in wealth on the year. Ellison's year-to-date gains are among the largest of the world's richest, trailing only Mark Zuckerberg (+$51.4 billion) and Jensen Huang (+$51.0 billion). Zuckerberg ranks fourth on the list at $179 billion and could be the next target for Ellison to pass. Huang ranks 18th on the list, but continues to be one of the fastest risers in wealth. Oracle stock is up 51% year-to-date, as seen on the Benzinga Pro chart below. Microsoft, for comparison, is up 14% year-to-date. Did You Know? Congress Is Making Huge Investments. Get Tips On What They Bought And Sold Ahead Of The 2024 Election With Our Easy-to-Use Tool Why It's Important: The strong stock performance of Oracle has helped boost Ellison's wealth and shows what large ownership from a founder of a company can do. Huang also holds a large percentage of his wealth in NVIDIA, a company he co-founded and leads. The world's richest person, Elon Musk has the majority of his wealth come from Tesla and SpaceX stakes along with other ventures. Gates has a small ownership stake in Microsoft, and his portfolio includes stakes in other companies. Oracle shares fell in July on news that Musk's xAI had ended talks about a potential server deal. Oracle reported quarterly earnings that showed strength from existing and recently announced partnerships. Ellison's wealth could continue to climb if Oracle remains a leader in the AI space, but several of the billionaires ahead of him are also benefiting from the growing sector. Read Next: Paramount To Be Controlled By World's Sixth-Richest Man Larry Ellison: How Helping His Son Landed A Media Stake Photo: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Larry Ellison is making so much money off of AI his net worth is approaching Jeff Bezos's

The artificial intelligence boom has sent some shares and net worths soaring this year, including that of Oracle (ORCL) and its co-founder, Larry Ellison. The tech billionaire is closing in on Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos's net worth as the software giant's shares drive higher due to its cloud businesses. Ellison owns just under 40% of Oracle's outstanding stock, according to Forbes, which has climbed almost 55% so far this year. The Oracle chairman and chief technology officer's real-time net worth is $192.4 billion, according to Forbes -- putting him about $10 billion behind Bezos's real-time net worth of $202.6 billion. Meanwhile, Ellison's total net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is currently $168 billion. After Oracle beat Wall Street's estimates in its first-quarter earnings report on Monday, the software company saw its shares jump 13% on Tuesday, before closing at a record $157.10 on Wednesday. The company's total quarterly revenues in USD were up 7% from the previous year, while revenues were up 8% in constant currency, it said. In its cloud services division, Oracle's revenues in USD were up 12% year-over-year, while it was up 22% in constant currency. "As Cloud Services became Oracle's largest business, both our operating income and earnings per share growth accelerated," Oracle chief executive, Safra Catz, said in a statement. Meanwhile, Ellison said the company has 162 cloud data centers, either in operation or under construction, around the world. "The largest of these datacenters is 800 megawatts and will contain acres of NVIDIA GPU Clusters for training large scale AI models," Ellison said. Nvidia (NVDA) has also been a winner of the AI boom, seeing its shares rise around 146.7% so far this year on demand for its AI chips. On Tuesday, however, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said shortages of its highly anticipated Blackwell chips have customers feeling "tense."

The $200bn man: Larry Ellison's wealth rebounds as Oracle joins AI boom

Until recently, it looked as though the cloud computing market had been locked up. Just three American companies -- Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- account for nearly two-thirds of the cloud infrastructure business, selling computing to customers who no longer want to run their own data centres. As with much else in the tech industry, generative AI has caused a rethink. A new generation of cloud competitors has found an opening with the sudden jump in demand for the massive computing power to train and run the latest AI models. The question now is whether they can ride this wave of demand to reach meaningful scale -- or whether this is just a short-term opening caused by shortages of AI chips, along with the stock market's insatiable need to find more AI winners. Take the unlikely Wall Street renaissance of database software maker Oracle as a cloud infrastructure company. Its shares have jumped 15 per cent after it reported earnings this week and are up 90 per cent since the start of last year. That has put co-founder Larry Ellison, a pioneer from an earlier tech era, within a whisker of overtaking Jeff Bezos to become the world's second-richest person with net wealth of $196bn, according to Forbes. For years, Oracle seemed happy to take a back seat in the IT world's most important platform shift. It moved its business applications to the cloud, but rather than go all in, it poured its cash into buying back stock instead (and as its share count collapsed in the decade to 2021, Ellison's personal stake in the company leapt from 22 per cent to 42 per cent). Finally, Oracle seems to have got cloud religion. But is it really possible to join a computing revolution a decade and a half late and expect to be a serious contender? In a business where economies of scale really count, it is going up against companies with unrivalled resources and well-developed expertise in running large fleets of data centres. Part of Oracle's new cloud push has involved planting its own servers, running its database software, inside the data centres of other cloud companies. That makes it easier for customers to connect their data and applications across different clouds, a logical move that was capped this week by an alliance with arch rival Amazon Web Services. But there's no question where the really big opportunity lies. Ellison this week predicted that training the most advanced AI models would soon cost $100bn apiece, leading to a huge market that would be dominated by a handful of companies for the next decade. He is not alone in believing that becoming a strategic supplier to these AI giants represents a once-in-a-generation opening in the cloud market. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang likes to talk about the "AI factories" needed to power the generative AI boom -- companies like Coreweave and Lambda Labs, which have bought his company's general processing units in bulk. In a sign of its early success, virtually all of Oracle's growth this quarter came from cloud infrastructure, even though this still makes up only 17 per cent of total revenues. Yet a huge gulf still separates it from the cloud giants. Its $2.2bn in revenue from this business was dwarfed by the $26bn reported by Amazon Web Services. At the same time, its capex pales in comparison to the soaring investments at the biggest tech companies. The $2.3bn it spent on building data centres this quarter was dwarfed by the $19bn Microsoft ploughed into new facilities and equipment. For now, shortages of Nvidia's GPUs have created an opening, as even the biggest players look to offload part of their AI computing needs on to others with spare capacity. Some of the AI features in Microsoft's Bing search engine now run in Oracle's cloud, while close Microsoft partner OpenAI has also shifted part of the work of training its AI models to Oracle. What will happen when the supply of AI chips catches up with demand is an open question. Also, some of the biggest AI companies see vertical integration -- running their models on their own hardware -- as an important strategic advantage. Elon Musk recently turned away from Oracle when it came to building the next giant GPU cluster for X.AI, instead saying that an expertise in hardware was a core skill that his AI company needed to develop for itself. Companies like Oracle still claim that coming later to the business and designing specialist data centres has given them an advantage over the older facilities of the cloud giants. If AI euphoria recedes, that claim could be put to the test.