Larry Ellison Or Elon Musk? Oracle CTO's $70 Bn-Wealth Surge Tightens Race For World's Richest Man

Elon Musk’s reign as the world’s richest man may soon be challenged — and the contender is none other than Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The 81-year-old billionaire saw his fortune swell by a staggering $70 billion in just one day, after Oracle Corp. delivered an aggressive outlook for its cloud business that sent its shares skyrocketing.

Ellison, who serves as chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, has the bulk of his net worth tied up in the database software company. His net worth has now surged to $364 billion, putting him within striking distance of Musk’s $384 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

If Ellison’s gain remains when trading begins on Wednesday, it’ll be the biggest one-day increase ever recorded by the index. Musk became the world’s richest person for the first time in 2021 before losing the title to Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. He reclaimed it last year and has now held it for just over 300 days.

Ellison’s rise underscores Oracle’s growing clout in cloud computing, where it is emerging as a key provider of such computing capacity, competing against cloud leaders Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

On Tuesday, Oracle reported quarterly results that blew past Wall Street expectations and projected even stronger growth ahead. The announcement sent the company’s shares soaring more than 26% in extended trading — its biggest one-day gain since 1999.

Musk, meanwhile, has seen his wealth erode in recent months. Shares of Tesla Inc., are down about 14% this year. On June 6, Musk lost $34 billion in net worth after a public spat with former US President Donald Trump spiraled into a war of words on social media. That was the second-largest single-day loss in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index’s history, behind only Musk’s own record $35 billion wipeout in November 2021.

Larry Ellison is the richest person in California, as per Forbes 400 ranking of the wealthiest Americans released Tuesday. The 400 richest people in the country are worth a record $6.6 trillion — $1.2 trillion richer than they were last year, mainly due to surging stock markets and “AI mania," Forbes said.