This Tech Giant Defined AI In 2025, And It's Not Musk Or Bezos

Despite having made his way into the White House for a short-run, and unveiling a notable AI chatbot such as Grok via his firm xAI, billionaire Elon Musk did not define AI in 2025.

According to Bloomberg, Oracle's co-founder Larry Ellison defined the trajectory of AI advancement in 2025, despite lagging two spots behind Elon Musk (who took first place) in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, at fourth place.

Ellison currently has a net worth of $252 billion as compared to Musk's $631 billion. He did, however, see the largest wealth increase in a single day in September 2025 due to AI.

The 81-year-old chairman of Oracle made $89 billion within a day to have his wealth reach $388 billion at that time, the largest jump in net worth recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in a single day.

This was due to Oracle's stock skyrocketing by 40% after strong quarterly earnings, and an aggressive growth forecast for its AI-driven cloud services. 

The stock was also upbeat due to a deal with OpenAI worth over $300 billion to rent a large amount of computing power from Oracle, becoming the company's largest customer.

On a net basis, Ellison's wealth has increased by $59.6 billion in 2025 so far, which marks a sharper gain as compared to Jeff Bezos' $16.2 billion net addition.

Ellison was also one of the minds behind Stargate, an ambitious plan to expand and establish AI data centres across the US.

Ellison, along with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank Group Corp. chief Masayoshi Son, appeared at the White House with US President Donald Trump to announce a plan worth $500 billion to build AI infrastructure.

Stargate is also expected to provide 100,000 jobs.

Larry Ellison also attempts to expand his control over the media landscape, similar to his contemporary Musk who purchased the social media platform Twitter for $44 billion and renamed it to 'X'. Ellison and his son David, instead, set their sights on Hollywood, by first acquiring Paramount via David's SkyDance Media, a deal largely financed by his father.

Paramount is a major Hollywood studios that has made notable films such as The Godfather and Top Gun: Maverick and has properties such as Transformers, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible and Star Trek.

The Ellisons then tried to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which was suffering from debt and was already screening potential buyers.

When the company behind Batman, Lord Of The Rings and Bugs Bunny went to Netflix instead, Ellison offered to personally put forth $40.4 billion in financing. The deal is yet to be finalised and negotiations are ongoing for WB Discovery.

Bloomberg noted that a large part of Ellison's fortune is dependent on whether or not OpenAI can pull through on its promises, which were the basis of which the latter had secured funding in the first place. It also pointed to the debt that Oracle and SkyDance had accumulated to fund their ambitious endeavours.

This indicated that Ellison's wealth is not set in stone and will likely be subject to a lot of external factors that are not necessarily in his control.