Larry Ellison's AI-Powered Resurgence: Oracle Co-Founder Briefly Becomes World's Richest Person

Larry Ellison is back on top, 48 years after he co-founded Oracle

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Fortune magazine wondered on its cover whether Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison might become the world's richest person, while BusinessWeek declared Ellison is "cool again," noting that "Silicon Valley's bad boy is having his revenge." Both were published 25 years ago, but they could've run this week. The octogenarian Ellison is back in headlines after Oracle announced a clutch of cloud computing deals that rocked the tech world and sent its stock up 35.9%, putting Ellison's fortune close to $400 billion, second globally only to Elon Musk. Then on Thursday, news broke that Paramount, the media conglomerate Ellison's family now controls, is preparing a bid to buy out the storied Warner Bros Discovery, threatening overnight to dominate Hollywood and culture. The swashbuckling billionaire may have been known more for his yacht collection, his ownership of a Hawaiian island or his longstanding support of Donald Trump. More recently, with little fanfare, he has plotted his way back to the center of power. At Paramount, his son David appears to be tilting CBS News toward the right, tapping Trump supporter and former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute Kenneth Weinstein as ombudsman for CBS News. He also is reportedly considering The Free Press's Bari Weiss for a leadership role at the news organization. Ellison has also got his hands on TikTok. In 2022, Oracle began providing U.S. tech infrastructure to the short video-sharing platform after national security questions arose over the Chinese-owned service used by over 170 million Americans. Some probably have forgotten that Ellison's brash tactics and lavish lifestyles earned him the role of bad boy of Silicon Valley since he co-founded Oracle in 1977. In 2010, he played himself in "Iron Man 2." Remarkably, Ellison has honed a reputation as an uber tech titan and playboy while tackling decidedly unsexy, vexingly hard computing challenges. Recently, he helped figure out how to string together thousands of computers to run artificial intelligence systems. Massive, AI-level money was more elusive until the latest quarter, when the cloud deals juiced Oracle's stock price. Oracle vanquished database rivals in the 1990s, then missed nearly a decade of the sales and stock market gains from the wholesale shift of business applications to the cloud. While AI shows tremendous promise for Oracle, success is far from certain, given that the entire industry is still working on a profitable business model. Also, Oracle has tied itself particularly closely to a single company -- OpenAI, which, according to a person familiar with the matter, is committed to paying Oracle $300 billion for computing resources over five years. DON'T COMPETE WITH NVIDIA Oracle became an AI landlord, courting marquee customers including Meta and Elon Musk's xAI in addition to its new biggest client, OpenAI. That shift has helped booked revenue surge more than four-fold to $455 billion. "People have definitely questioned him over the years," said Matthew Durot, deputy editor for wealth at Forbes, which calculates his fortune. With Oracle's focus on AI, "He's sort of got the last laugh - at least for now." One key decision helped: Oracle chose not to build custom AI chips like Microsoft, Amazon and Google. The decision to instead rely on Nvidia has likely helped it get more chips from the global leader of AI processors, analysts said. Ellison himself led the way. At a dinner in 2024, Ellison took Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Nobu, his Palo Alto sushi restaurant. "Please take our money," Ellison said he told Huang. "It worked," Ellison added in an earnings call with equity analysts. Within several months of that sushi dinner, Oracle landed more GPUs, closed a compute deal with OpenAI and announced a splashy half a trillion dollars OpenAI computing project, Stargate. Oracle's first cloud venture in 2016 ended in business disaster but a second, launched in 2018, was a service that proved cheaper and more flexible than other offerings. In 2020, when Zoom Technologies was buckling under a crush of new traffic during the pandemic, it tapped Oracle's cloud and its hiccups and outages all but vanished. In 2022, when TikTok moved the data of more than 100 million U.S. users to Oracle's cloud, the changeover went largely unnoticed by users. Analysts called this a major technical feat. HUGE RISKS REMAIN Ellison is known for piling up injuries in extreme sports, and Oracle's rush into AI shows a taste for risk. The company does not buy land, build data centers or power plants. It outsources all those functions to partners, who may or may not come through, said Chirag Dekate, a vice president and analyst at research firm Gartner. It also remains to be seen whether partners such as OpenAI can amass the capital to pay Oracle, since OpenAI is still building a business it hopes will be profitable. "When you have just one handful of customers, and one of those customers goes away, you are left with a really large hole that you now need to figure out how to fill," Dekate said. Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Akash Sriram in Bangalore; Editing by David Gregorio Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence * Corporate Governance Akash Sriram Thomson Reuters Akash reports on technology companies in the United States, electric vehicle companies, and the space industry. His reporting usually appears in the Autos & Transportation and Technology sections. He has a postgraduate degree in Conflict, Development, and Security from the University of Leeds. Akash's interests include music, football (soccer), and Formula 1.

Larry Ellison, the tech world's great survivor

As Larry Ellison settled in for dinner at the elegant Japanese restaurant Nobu in Palo Alto last year, he was joined by his longtime friend Elon Musk. The pair had dined there together several times, but on this occasion they sat across from Nvidia's Jensen Huang. The two billionaires shared an objective: get their hands on more of the Nvidia chips, known as GPUs, fuelling the generative AI revolution. "I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs: 'Please take our money. No, no, take more of it,'" Ellison, co-founder of software company Oracle, later told an audience of financial analysts. "By the way, I got dinner . . . It went OK. It worked." The high-stakes networking speaks volumes about how Ellison, at the age 81, has clawed his way back to the top of the tech heap. A close friend and ally of Apple's Steve Jobs during a previous tech era, he is now forging new personal alliances and navigating the industry's often intense rivalries on the way to staking out a place in the vanguard of the AI revolution. Ellison turned up earlier this year in the Oval Office alongside Sam Altman -- a bitter enemy of Musk -- for the unveiling of a mammoth AI infrastructure project, known as Stargate. This week, it emerged that OpenAI had moved ahead with that project by placing a $300bn order with Oracle, making it the centrepiece of a booming backlog of new business that has turned Ellison's 48-year-old company into the hottest new AI property on Wall Street. With Oracle's shares soaring, his personal wealth exploded by more than $100bn this week, taking him past Musk to become, at least briefly, the world's richest person, with a fortune of close to $400bn. Ellison's personal reinvention as a power in AI has cemented his position as the tech world's great survivor. "He stands alone. There's no one else like this, who has prospered in Silicon Valley for 50 years," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a former Ellison protégé. "Other people have passed on; he perseveres." The rise of a new generation of tech leaders this century had previously made it easy to write Ellison off as part of the sector's past. His company's database might have an important place in the guts of government and business IT systems but it hardly seemed central to tech's future. Until recently, he had shunned the heavy investments needed to make Oracle a player in cloud computing -- a business dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. But according to one person who worked closely with Ellison, he always paid attention to the technology transition. Other tech bosses may blaze a trail early in a new technology, but Ellison waits for a market to develop and "watches where the business is, where the money is flowing". Being first isn't what matters to him. "It's about being the last man standing." Now, with a late play that has caught a tailwind from AI, he may unexpectedly have put his company toe-to-toe with the giants of the cloud business. The Larry Ellison who is steering Oracle's AI-powered rise is a less contentious figure than the flamboyant character who flourished in the internet boom of the 1990s. Raised in Chicago by his adoptive relatives, he seemed to revel in his reputation as the bad boy of tech. From the accounting scandal that nearly wrecked Oracle in 1990 to its use of private detectives to dig into nemesis Bill Gates' Microsoft, his company never seemed far from controversy. If Oracle's path has seemed smoother of late, it owes much of this to one of Silicon Valley's great unsung partnerships. Safra Catz, a former banker and chief Ellison lieutenant, has in effect run the company since the late 1990s, according to one former staffer, though Ellison only formally gave up the CEO title in 2014. The arrangement has left Ellison freer to engage in high-level corporate strategy along with the kind of mega-rich pursuits that have made him the subject of media fascination, from twice winning the sailing world's America's Cup to buying nearly an island in Hawaii. Catz's closeness to Donald Trump -- she was part of his presidential transition team in 2016 -- may also have helped Ellison to maintain a convivial relationship with the president, despite his apparent disloyalty in backing other Republican candidates. One mark of political favour was Oracle's success at outmanoeuvring its old enemy Microsoft to be selected as putative minority owner for TikTok's US operations. That deal has yet to happen, though TikTok's US service is run from Oracle's data centres. Ellison's energy seems unabated. With wife Jolin he has been devoting much of his time recently to a new family, say people who know him. The couple have four young children. He has also sought to refocus his long-running interests in medical and other scientific research, much of it into the diseases of ageing, with the new Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, UK. Then there's Hollywood. After backing daughter Megan's venture into movie production, he is now supporting son David, who this summer took control of Paramount and is reported to be preparing a bid for Warner Bros Discovery. Hollywood's studio chiefs thought Larry Ellison "was just another rich person writing checks" to bankroll movies, says one people who worked closely with him. "Instead, he's showing them how to run their business."

Oracle's huge AI contracts fuel Larry Ellison's late-career reinvention

For years, Larry Ellison was Silicon Valley's favorite dinosaur. The Oracle co-founder mocked the cloud as a marketing gimmick while Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, and Sundar Pichai built empires on it. Reporters cast Ellison as the old guard: a vaguely ridiculous mogul best remembered for yachts, leather jackets, and a private island, not vision. Then the AI compute crunch arrived, and Ellison did the least fashionable thing in tech: He showed up with a hard hat. He stopped trying to win the cocktail party and set out to guarantee the one thing developers, startups, and megaclients couldn't get enough of: compute capacity. Power first, buildings second, racks stuffed with GPUs, and signatures on contracts that lock in that capacity for years. The market's verdict was unambiguous. On Sept. 9, Oracle dropped a number so large it just about made Wall Street choke: $455 billion in remaining performance obligations -- contracts already signed and committed, up 359% from a year earlier. Four separate multibillion-dollar deals landed in the span of a single quarter. On Wall Street, that backlog looked less like a tech pipeline and more like a public-works budget. Investors reacted accordingly: Oracle stock recorded its biggest one-day jump since 1992. And because Ellison still owns roughly 41% of the company, the paper math briefly made him the richest man alive. For a moment -- until Tesla shares twitched and Elon Musk reclaimed the top spot -- the octogenarian who once sneered at the cloud sat atop the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. None of that made Oracle cooler. But it did make Ellison unavoidable. The guy who once sneered at "cloud" had been rewarded for selling the hardest part of it: time and power -- two things the AI boom can't get enough of. Oracle isn't the playground for cool developers, and Ellison doesn't pretend it is. Ellison didn't win back relevance by reinventing software. He did it by making himself the landlord of an AI factory economy that runs not on hype but on megawatts, racks, and signatures that stretch into the 2030s. While everyone else sold delight, Ellison sold delivery. And in a year when AI hype kept smashing into the laws of physics, boring delivery suddenly became the hottest commodity in tech. What Oracle is selling is usable compute capacity -- power, racks, and the infrastructure to run workloads when and where customers need them. That's why the market now values Oracle less like a software vendor and more like a utility landlord with a cloud console. The product isn't features; it's capacity on a schedule. That's how you get a backlog number that reads like a public-works budget and a one-day wealth spike big enough to rearrange the billionaire rankings, even if only for an afternoon. That's the context for Ellison's late-career reinvention. He hasn't gotten younger or cooler. But he's managed to turn Oracle -- a company written off as legacy a dozen times over -- into the kind of entity customers may grumble about but can't quit. That's the trick. Not making people love you. Making them need you. And right now, they do. What he's doing now looks very different. Instead of chasing SaaS logos, Oracle is chasing inputs: GPUs, land, and electricity. Scarcity has flipped the script. In 2025, the rarest product isn't clever code; it's a data hall with power actually flowing to it. Oracle has leaned into that role. In Shackelford County, Texas, a developer is building a 1.4-gigawatt campus dubbed Frontier, and reports suggests Oracle is ready to keep it humming with gas generators if utility hookups lag -- an inelegant but effective way to deliver capacity on time. Ellison's posture is pragmatic. He no longer talks about locking customers into his walled garden; he talks about multicloud. Oracle now cuts deals so its databases can run inside Amazon, Microsoft, or Google's infrastructure. On the September call, CEO Safra Catz highlighted "multicloud database revenue" growing at four-digit percentages off a small base. The substance matters less than the shift: Oracle is finally selling itself as a partner, not a jailer. Those four new multibillion-dollar agreements in a single quarter didn't just pad remaining performance obligations (RPO); they signaled that some of the most compute-hungry customers are willing to bind themselves to Oracle for the long haul. But Ellison's newfound indispensability could rest on one giant asterisk: Oracle's backlog is just paper until the lights actually flick on. A $455 billion stack of obligations looks impressive on a slide; it looks a lot less certain if substations don't connect on schedule. Oracle's reinvention is real only if it can turn signatures into electrons, and electrons into cash. The biggest question mark is concentration. The Wall Street Journal reported that a huge slice of that backlog is a single customer -- OpenAI -- agreeing to spend $300 billion of compute over five years starting in 2027. That's whale hunting on steroids. It's great if the whale keeps swimming; it's disastrous if it migrates for the season. For now, Ellison gets credit for landing the catch. But the perception of being "the OpenAI cloud" isn't diversification. It's dependency. Whale accounts make for glorious top lines and nervous CFOs. If a single AI tenant represents an outsized share of the stack, Ellison's "overflow valve for the industry" pitch risks turning into a "whale-in-a-bathtub" reality. It's a clever workaround but also a reminder: Ellison's reinvention is built on concrete and transformers, not just code. If deadlines slip, regulators balk, neighbors complain -- suddenly, those glowing backlog numbers start to look like IOUs. RPO converts into revenue over years, and in Oracle's case, much of it won't show up until later this decade. That's why analysts immediately flagged the risk ledger. Concentration risk: If OpenAI is the whale behind much of that spike, what happens if it stumbles or diversifies its compute elsewhere? Conversion risk: $455 billion on paper is only as good as the substations, transformers, and racks that turn it into cash. And power risk: Temporary gas plants may solve deadlines, but they invite regulatory scrutiny and environmental blowback. The cloud is no longer defined by APIs and dashboards. It's defined by who can spin up 20 megawatts of power and a few thousand GPUs without waiting a decade for utility approvals. Suddenly Ellison's taste for the industrial -- steel, substations, long contracts -- looks prescient. Oracle's Shackelford County, Texas, move would have gotten him laughed off the stage 10 years ago. Today it reads like operational competence. This isn't your parents' Oracle, minting license fees with enviable margins. Capital expenditures have ballooned; free cash flow is projected to dip negative as billions are poured into new capacity. That's not unusual for utilities. But it's unusual for a software company whose appeal once rested on 30%-plus operating margins and steady license renewals. Investors are, in effect, funding Ellison's reinvention on the belief that those multiyear deals will convert. Ellison is asking investors to think less like software analysts and more like utility regulators. So far they've obliged. But investor patience is a short fuse. Miss too many energization dates, and the market turns on you faster than an overworked generator. Ellison has always had a taste for control. Owning the database market wasn't enough; he wanted to own the hardware that ran it, the salespeople who hawked it, the campus they worked in, even the Hawaiian island he retreated to when he was done with them. Control was the through-line. In the 2010s, Ellison's instincts looked maladjusted. He mocked the cloud -- "Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" -- while Salesforce's Marc Benioff railed against Oracle's "false clouds" while riding the real thing to glory (and turning Ellison into a pantomime villain). Analysts routinely described Oracle as a laggard. The company wasn't trendy, it wasn't growing, and it certainly wasn't where young engineers wanted to be. For much of the past decade, the Ellison name was in the headlines less because of Larry and more because of his children. David Ellison parlayed family billions into Skydance, a studio that financed "Mission: Impossible" and "Top Gun: Maverick" before muscling its way into a Paramount takeover fight. Megan Ellison chased a different corner of Hollywood, underwriting prestige fare from "Zero Dark Thirty" to "Phantom Thread" through Annapurna Pictures. For a while, it felt like the Ellisons who mattered were the ones writing checks in Los Angeles, not the one in Redwood Shores. Ellison's greatest public trick has always been the mix of showman and street fighter. The version of him that wins this decade is less pirate, more project manager -- the executive who can charm a city council on Tuesday and demand a substation delivery on Thursday, all while keeping enough peace with rivals to keep the multicloud escape hatches open. That's not the myth he built in his youth, but it's the role the market happens to need now. By leaning into what once made him look outdated -- the industrial, the unglamorous -- Ellison has stumbled into relevance again. Oracle isn't the trendiest place to work. Its developer halo is dim. But in an economy where AI demand is bottlenecked by transformers and substations, being reliable and boring is a competitive advantage. So what do we call this phase of Ellison's career? Act One was the database kingpin years, where Oracle minted money selling corporate plumbing. Act Two was the cloud skeptic turned late adopter, the era of "false clouds" and missed growth curves. Act Three is shaping up as something stranger: Ellison as a utility baron, selling electrons and floor space dressed in the language of the cloud. The risks are real, the timelines are long, and the crown of "world's richest" was fleeting. But Ellison has already rewritten the narrative. The man who once sneered at the idea of the cloud is now selling the part everyone else forgot to brand: time to power. For the moment, the lights are pointed his way. Not because he dazzled anyone. Because he promised something simple and scarce -- and convinced the world he could deliver it. And in a business addicted to the next shiny thing, that's the oldest trick in the book.

Trump ally on cusp of overtaking Musk as world's richest man

The technology mogul and Donald Trump ally Larry Ellison is closing in on Elon Musk's status as the world's richest man after his fortune jumped by $81bn (£60bn) overnight. Shares in Oracle, Mr Ellison's IT giant, rose by almost 30pc after an explosion in new business linked to the AI boom. Mr Ellison, 81, founded Oracle in 1977 and owns 41pc of the company. The stake is worth $358bn, while Mr Ellison is also believed to own shares in Tesla worth around $17bn. The two stakes combined are worth $375bn. This would put him within touching distance of Mr Musk, who is worth $384bn, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Mr Ellison has supported Mr Trump for years and has repeatedly appeared at White House events during the US president's second term. He has also donated hundreds of millions to Sir Tony Blair's Institute for Global Change, and put more than $1bn into an Oxford science and technology hub. Oracle's increasing influence Oracle, best known for database management software, has become a major player in cloud computing, in which companies construct vast data centres and rent out high-powered IT capacity to companies. On Tuesday, it said that its "remaining performance obligations" - deals it had signed that would lead to future sales - had reached $455bn, up from $138bn three months earlier. Safra Catz, the company's chief executive, said Oracle had signed deals with "the who's who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, [Advanced Micro Devices] AMD and many others". Oracle is involved in a $500bn "Stargate" project in the US with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank. In March, the company said it planned to invest $5bn in Britain. Mr Ellison opened his California estate for a Trump fundraiser in 2020 and was frequently at Mar-a-Lago as Mr Trump prepared his return to the White House. Oracle is part of a consortium that has put together a bid to buy TikTok's US operations from ByteDance, its Beijing-headquartered parent company. A forced sale has been repeatedly delayed by the Trump administration. Mr Musk's net worth is largely made up of his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla shares have fallen so far this year as the company suffers declining sales and growing competition. Last week, Tesla unveiled a compensation package for Mr Musk that would see him become the world's first trillionaire. He would be awarded shares worth $1tn for hitting a series of goals, including selling one million robots and Tesla reaching a market value of $8.5tn.

The world's richest person: Larry Ellison briefly replaced Elon Musk

Oracle's shares soared over 40% on Wednesday before slipping slightly, boosting co-founder Larry Ellison's fortune beyond the Tesla CEO's wealth for a few hours. In a stunning few minutes after markets opened on Wednesday, stock in Larry Ellison's Oracle Corp. rocketed more than a third, enough for him to temporarily wrest the title of the 'wealthiest person in the world' from its longtime holder, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. But the stock market is fickle, and Musk was back on top by the end of the day, according to Bloomberg, as the software giant gave up some earlier gains. For those keeping score, the difference now is a billion, which isn't much given the size of the figures: Musk's $384.2 billion (€328.57bn) versus roughly $383.2bn (€327.71bn) for Ellison. The duelling fortunes are so big that each could fund the lifestyles of 5 million typical American families for a year, about the entire population of Florida, allowing them to all quit their jobs. Or they could just tell all of South Africa to take a vacation for a year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product. The brief switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle, powered by multibillion-dollar orders from customers, as the artificial-intelligence race heats up. Musk became the world's richest person for the first time four years ago. A big reason is his stake in a hot, but now cooling, electric carmaker, Tesla. Stock in the company has been moving in the opposite direction of Oracle's, dropping more than 8% so far this year. Musk also controls several private companies, including rocket maker SpaceX, his artificial intelligence company xAI, and the former Twitter, now called X. Ellison owns about 40% of Oracle, which means its surging stock added $100bn (€85.53bn) to his net worth in little over half an hour after the stock market opened on Wednesday. The night before, after trading had closed, the company announced in an earnings report that it had struck more than $300bn (€256.56bn) worth of new deals, including contracts with OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia and Musk's xAI. It said that it now expects revenue from its cloud infrastructure business to jump 77% to $18bn (€15.39bn) this fiscal year, then rise to $144bn (€123.15bn) in four years after that. Ellison said in an earnings call that Oracle would not just be making money from its computing centres that help build the next chatbots, but from the day-to-day running of those AI systems to run robots in factories, design drugs in laboratories, place bets in financial markets and automate legal and sales work at companies. In other words, Ellison's surge in wealth on Wednesday morning reflected investor expectations that computers will take over many jobs now done by humans -- and Oracle will benefit. Or as the 81-year-old said on the call, "AI Changes Everything." Musk is hoping the same for Tesla and his own net worth, but he's been struggling to convince investors. The company had been promising a big turnaround in electric car sales after they fell sharply earlier this year, but the bounce back hasn't happened. Musk has been downplaying the bad numbers by trying to shift investors' focus to Tesla's other business of making robots and advances in the artificial intelligence behind its cars and robotaxis. While he keeps talking up the Tesla future, though, the bad news keeps coming. Tesla sales in the European Union plunged 40% earlier this summer, the seventh month in a row of drops, as customers baulked at buying his cars after he took to X to support extreme right-wing politicians there. The company has been losing market share in the US, too, as buyers, angry with his embrace of Donald Trump, have stayed away from Tesla showrooms. Oracle stock closed Wednesday at $328.33, a 36% jump. Tesla was up less than 1% at $347.79.

Larry Ellison Is Back on Top, 48 Years After He Co-Founded Oracle

By Stephen Nellis and Akash Sriram SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Fortune magazine wondered on its cover whether Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison might become the world's richest person, while BusinessWeek declared Ellison is "cool again," noting that "Silicon Valley's bad boy is having his revenge." Both were published 25 years ago, but they could've run this week. The octogenarian Ellison is back in headlines after Oracle announced a clutch of cloud computing deals that rocked the tech world and sent its stock up 35.9%, putting Ellison's fortune close to $400 billion, second globally only to Elon Musk. Then on Thursday, news broke that Paramount, the media conglomerate Ellison's family now controls, is preparing a bid to buy out the storied Warner Bros Discovery, threatening overnight to dominate Hollywood and culture. The swashbuckling billionaire may have been known more for his yacht collection, his ownership of a Hawaiian island or his longstanding support of Donald Trump. More recently, with little fanfare, he has plotted his way back to the center of power. At Paramount, his son David appears to be tilting CBS News toward the right, tapping Trump supporter and former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute Kenneth Weinstein as ombudsman for CBS News. He also is reportedly considering The Free Press's Bari Weiss for a leadership role at the news organization. Ellison has also got his hands on TikTok. In 2022, Oracle began providing U.S. tech infrastructure to the short video-sharing platform after national security questions arose over the Chinese-owned service used by over 170 million Americans. Some probably have forgotten that Ellison's brash tactics and lavish lifestyles earned him the role of bad boy of Silicon Valley since he co-founded Oracle in 1977. In 2010, he played himself in "Iron Man 2." Remarkably, Ellison has honed a reputation as an uber tech titan and playboy while tackling decidedly unsexy, vexingly hard computing challenges. Recently, he helped figure out how to string together thousands of computers to run artificial intelligence systems. Massive, AI-level money was more elusive until the latest quarter, when the cloud deals juiced Oracle's stock price. Oracle vanquished database rivals in the 1990s, then missed nearly a decade of the sales and stock market gains from the wholesale shift of business applications to the cloud. While AI shows tremendous promise for Oracle, success is far from certain, given that the entire industry is still working on a profitable business model. Also, Oracle has tied itself particularly closely to a single company -- OpenAI, which, according to a person familiar with the matter, is committed to paying Oracle $300 billion for computing resources over five years. DON'T COMPETE WITH NVIDIA Oracle became an AI landlord, courting marquee customers including Meta and Elon Musk's xAI in addition to its new biggest client, OpenAI. That shift has helped booked revenue surge more than four-fold to $455 billion. "People have definitely questioned him over the years," said Matthew Durot, deputy editor for wealth at Forbes, which calculates his fortune. With Oracle's focus on AI, "He's sort of got the last laugh - at least for now." One key decision helped: Oracle chose not to build custom AI chips like Microsoft, Amazon and Google. The decision to instead rely on Nvidia has likely helped it get more chips from the global leader of AI processors, analysts said. Ellison himself led the way. At a dinner in 2024, Ellison took Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Nobu, his Palo Alto sushi restaurant. "Please take our money," Ellison said he told Huang. "It worked," Ellison added in an earnings call with equity analysts. Within several months of that sushi dinner, Oracle landed more GPUs, closed a compute deal with OpenAI and announced a splashy half a trillion dollars OpenAI computing project, Stargate. Oracle's first cloud venture in 2016 ended in business disaster but a second, launched in 2018, was a service that proved cheaper and more flexible than other offerings. In 2020, when Zoom Technologies was buckling under a crush of new traffic during the pandemic, it tapped Oracle's cloud and its hiccups and outages all but vanished. In 2022, when TikTok moved the data of more than 100 million U.S. users to Oracle's cloud, the changeover went largely unnoticed by users. Analysts called this a major technical feat. HUGE RISKS REMAIN Ellison is known for piling up injuries in extreme sports, and Oracle's rush into AI shows a taste for risk. The company does not buy land, build data centers or power plants. It outsources all those functions to partners, who may or may not come through, said Chirag Dekate, a vice president and analyst at research firm Gartner. It also remains to be seen whether partners such as OpenAI can amass the capital to pay Oracle, since OpenAI is still building a business it hopes will be profitable. "When you have just one handful of customers, and one of those customers goes away, you are left with a really large hole that you now need to figure out how to fill," Dekate said. (Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Akash Sriram in Bangalore; Editing by David Gregorio)

Oracle stock turns 2025's multibagger after 41% surge; chairman Larry Ellison beats Elon Musk to become world's richest man

Oracle Corporation shares surged 41% in early Wednesday trade on Nasdaq, hitting a day's high of $339.68 after the company announced an AI Center of Excellence for healthcare to help organizations leverage rapid advances in artificial intelligence. The sharp rally also turned Oracle into a multibagger in 2025, with year-to-date returns crossing 100%. The surge was amid high volumes as nearly 43 million shares changed hands around 10:06 AM ET (7:40 India time). The stock's one-year returns now stand around 117% and may change on the closing price basis. The Oracle AI Center of Excellence for Healthcare offers a hub of resources and expertise that will help health systems and hospitals deploy and optimize AI across their organizations, a company filing to the exchanges said. The sharp surge in the IT stock dramatically shook up co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison's personal wealth surpassing Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. Ellison, who holds 41% stake in Oracle, was reported to have gotten a $101 billion boost to his net worth to over $400 billion due to the stock surge. The single-day surge highlights the immense influence of corporate performance on billionaire rankings and the volatility of tech fortunes. Oracle Corporation is a Texas, US-based multinational technology company. It was co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison. The company release said that soon, patients using the Oracle Health Patient Portal1 to view their comprehensive medical records will be able to engage with new AI capabilities to get secure, clear, plain-language explanations of diagnoses, test results, and treatment options. They will also be able to ask clarifying questions about their individual medical record directly within the portal. For instance, instead of struggling with jargon, users can simply ask, "What does this abbreviation mean?" Or "What was the result of my latest cholesterol test?" The AI will deliver context-aware answers instantly, helping patients better understand and manage their care. Wall Street traded mixed with DOW 30 declining by 93.41 points or 0.20% to 45,617.90. The S&P 500 was trading at 6,553.05, up 40.44 points or 0.62%while the Nasdaq Composite index gained 117.57 points or 0.54% and was hovering at 21,997.10 around this time. Also Read: Jane Street-backed Nebius Group surges 52% intraday after Microsoft pact; 1-year gains top 330% (Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of Economic Times)

After firing thousands, Oracle's Larry Ellison could overtake Musk as the richest person today as stock skyrockets

Larry Ellison net worth 2025: Larry Ellison, the co-founder and largest shareholder of Oracle Corporation, is on the verge of overtaking Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the world's richest person today after Oracle's stock surged in premarket trading on Wednesday. The software giant's stock rose more than 32% in premarket trading after the firm revealed its ambitious forecast that its AI-driven cloud revenue could reach $144 billion by fiscal year 2030, a huge jump from its current fiscal year projection of less than $20 billion, as per a report. Axios reported that Ellison owns about 1.16 billion shares of Oracle, which means if the stock gain continues in regular trading, his holdings' value would rise about $87.8 billion in one day. ALSO READ: Apple iPhone 17 & iPhone Air Accessories: Clear and silicone cases in multiple colors, crossbody strap, MagSafe battery and more! This massive rise in Oracle's stock comes amid a period of significant upheaval at the company, which recently laid off thousands of employees and reportedly considered cutting cash raises and bonuses, as per a Yahoo Finance report. Even after these tough internal decisions, Ellison's fortune soared by roughly $70 billion after the company's latest earnings report, bringing his net worth to about $364 billion, just behind Musk's $384 billion, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 81 year old, who serves as Oracle's chairman and chief technology officer, has most of his wealth tied to the company's stock, as per Bloomberg. ALSO READ: Apple unveils iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max: Features, pre-order dates, colors and specs His increasing fortune reflects the market's bullish response to Oracle's aggressive investment in AI infrastructure and cloud services. The company signed major multibillion-dollar contracts with leading AI innovators, including OpenAI, Meta, and others, securing a massive source of future revenue, according to Yahoo Finance. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, "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," as quoted by Yahoo Finance. ALSO READ: What happens to your uploaded photos on AI chatbots? Are they really private? While Oracle's most recent quarterly earnings slightly missed Wall Street expectations, the company's long-term vision and contract backlog of $455 billion have investors optimistic, according to the report. The tech giant is making huge capital expenditures, planning to spend $35 billion in 2026 to expand its data centers infrastructure, as per Yahoo Finance. Ellison said, "We expect MultiCloud revenue to grow substantially every quarter for several years as we deliver another 37 datacenters to our three hyperscaler partners, for a total of 71," as quoted by Reuters. ALSO READ: AI Chatbots' hidden cost: How your questions harm the planet through carbon emissions Why is Oracle's stock jumping so much? Oracle announced its AI cloud revenue could hit $144 billion by 2030, far exceeding current expectations, which excited investors. How much wealth will Larry Ellison gain from the stock surge? Ellison could gain nearly $88 billion in value from his Oracle shares if the price holds during the day.

Larry Ellison is back on top, 48 years after he co-founded Oracle

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Fortune magazine wondered on its cover whether Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison might become the world's richest person, while BusinessWeek declared Ellison is "cool again," noting that "Silicon Valley's bad boy is having his revenge." Both were published 25 years ago, but they could've run this week. The octogenarian Ellison is back in headlines after Oracle announced a clutch of cloud computing deals that rocked the tech world and sent its stock up 35.9%, putting Ellison's fortune close to $400 billion, second globally only to Elon Musk. Then on Thursday, news broke that Paramount, the media conglomerate Ellison's family now controls, is preparing a bid to buy out the storied Warner Bros Discovery, threatening overnight to dominate Hollywood and culture. The swashbuckling billionaire may have been known more for his yacht collection, his ownership of a Hawaiian island or his longstanding support of Donald Trump. More recently, with little fanfare, he has plotted his way back to the center of power. At Paramount, his son David appears to be tilting CBS News toward the right, tapping Trump supporter and former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute Kenneth Weinstein as ombudsman for CBS News. He also is reportedly considering The Free Press's Bari Weiss for a leadership role at the news organization. Ellison has also got his hands on TikTok. In 2022, Oracle began providing U.S. tech infrastructure to the short video-sharing platform after national security questions arose over the Chinese-owned service used by over 170 million Americans. Some probably have forgotten that Ellison's brash tactics and lavish lifestyles earned him the role of bad boy of Silicon Valley since he co-founded Oracle in 1977. In 2010, he played himself in "Iron Man 2." Remarkably, Ellison has honed a reputation as an uber tech titan and playboy while tackling decidedly unsexy, vexingly hard computing challenges. Recently, he helped figure out how to string together thousands of computers to run artificial intelligence systems. Massive, AI-level money was more elusive until the latest quarter, when the cloud deals juiced Oracle's stock price. Oracle vanquished database rivals in the 1990s, then missed nearly a decade of the sales and stock market gains from the wholesale shift of business applications to the cloud. While AI shows tremendous promise for Oracle, success is far from certain, given that the entire industry is still working on a profitable business model. Also, Oracle has tied itself particularly closely to a single company -- OpenAI, which, according to a person familiar with the matter, is committed to paying Oracle $300 billion for computing resources over five years. DON'T COMPETE WITH NVIDIA Oracle became an AI landlord, courting marquee customers including Meta and Elon Musk's xAI in addition to its new biggest client, OpenAI. That shift has helped booked revenue surge more than four-fold to $455 billion. "People have definitely questioned him over the years," said Matthew Durot, deputy editor for wealth at Forbes, which calculates his fortune. With Oracle's focus on AI, "He's sort of got the last laugh - at least for now." One key decision helped: Oracle chose not to build custom AI chips like Microsoft, Amazon and Google. The decision to instead rely on Nvidia has likely helped it get more chips from the global leader of AI processors, analysts said. Ellison himself led the way. At a dinner in 2024, Ellison took Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Nobu, his Palo Alto sushi restaurant. "Please take our money," Ellison said he told Huang. "It worked," Ellison added in an earnings call with equity analysts. Within several months of that sushi dinner, Oracle landed more GPUs, closed a compute deal with OpenAI and announced a splashy half a trillion dollars OpenAI computing project, Stargate. Oracle's first cloud venture in 2016 ended in business disaster but a second, launched in 2018, was a service that proved cheaper and more flexible than other offerings. In 2020, when Zoom Technologies was buckling under a crush of new traffic during the pandemic, it tapped Oracle's cloud and its hiccups and outages all but vanished. In 2022, when TikTok moved the data of more than 100 million U.S. users to Oracle's cloud, the changeover went largely unnoticed by users. Analysts called this a major technical feat. HUGE RISKS REMAIN Ellison is known for piling up injuries in extreme sports, and Oracle's rush into AI shows a taste for risk. The company does not buy land, build data centers or power plants. It outsources all those functions to partners, who may or may not come through, said Chirag Dekate, a vice president and analyst at research firm Gartner. It also remains to be seen whether partners such as OpenAI can amass the capital to pay Oracle, since OpenAI is still building a business it hopes will be profitable. "When you have just one handful of customers, and one of those customers goes away, you are left with a really large hole that you now need to figure out how to fill," Dekate said. (Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Akash Sriram in Bangalore; Editing by David Gregorio)