Larry Ellison’s Wealth Plunges $25 Billion After Oracle Slump
Ellison’s paper losses come just as the billionaire has committed to backstopping his son David’s $108 billion hostile offer for Warner Bros.
Three months after Larry Ellison briefly became the world’s richest person, a historic slide in Oracle Corp. shares sent his net worth plunging by $24.9 billion.
Oracle shares slumped by 11% Thursday after the cloud-computing provider reported earnings that included a surge in capital expenditures for AI data centers, raising concerns that the spending isn’t being converted into revenue as quickly as investors want. That pushed Ellison, 81, to third place from second on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
An Oracle spokesperson declined to comment.
Ellison’s paper losses come just as the billionaire has committed to backstopping his son David’s $108 billion hostile offer for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. After Ellison’s Paramount Skydance Corp. lost out to Netflix Inc. in the battle for the owner of media brands including Warner Brothers, HBO and CNN, it went directly to shareholders this week with a $30 per share all-cash bid, financed with $41 billion in new equity backstopped by the Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners.
Paramount has indicated that $30 is not its best or final offer, potentially setting up a protracted battle with Netflix.e planet.
Ellison still commands the wealth to finance a potential Warner Bros. purchase many times over should Paramount eventually win out, but the makeup of the most recent bid could add wrinkles if Ellison needs to deliver cash to close the deal. He currently holds cash and equivalents worth around $34.8 billion, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index, largely derived from historical Oracle stock sales. However, some of that is tied up in less liquid assets, including real estate and art, and it’s unclear how much of that sum he’d be able to immediately deploy.
In addition, Ellison had pledged about 30% of his Oracle stake as collateral to secure personal debts as of Sept. 19, according to Oracle’s 2025 proxy statement. That’s about a 25% increase from the amount of shares he’d pledged a year earlier.
Even after Thursday’s slide, Ellison’s Oracle stake — by far the largest chunk of his wealth — is still worth some $202.8 billion. He’s consistently sold stock for decades, but in relatively modest quantities: He hasn’t sold more than $1 billion of shares in a single year since 2010, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
Oracle has been in the cloud infrastructure business for over a decade, but it’s only recently positioned itself as a key player in the booming AI space. Earlier this year, it signed a landmark $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI, which is also one of its partners on the $500 billion Stargate data center project.
However, investors appear to be growing uneasy about the company’s massive spending, which rose to $12 billion last quarter. The cost to insure against Oracle defaulting on its debt recently spiked to the highest level in more than two years, and Morgan Stanley expects the firm’s net adjusted debt, already hovering around $100 billion, to nearly triple by fiscal year 2028.
It’s a dramatic reversal for Ellison, who briefly topped Elon Musk as the world’s richest person on Sept. 10, when Oracle’s shares surged 36% after it reported blowout earnings and boosted its cloud revenue forecasts. The intraday pop — which was Oracle’s largest since 1992 in percentage terms — added $89 billion to Ellison’s net worth, the biggest one-day gain ever recorded by Bloomberg’s wealth index. However, shares are down about 40% since then.
Despite today’s drop, Ellison is still $94.9 billion wealthier than he was a year ago.
