Oracle co-founder, CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison (C), U.S. President Donald Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (R), and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (2nd-R), share a laugh as Ellison uses a stool to stand on as he speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump announced an investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and took questions on a range of topics including his presidential pardons of Jan. 6 defendants, the war in Ukraine, cryptocurrencies and other topics.
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Larry Ellison became more than $110 billion richer on Wednesday, a day after Oracle, the software company he helped to start in 1977, issued dramatic cloud growth projections for the next five fiscal years.
Those projections sent Oracle’s stock price flying, up more than 40% on Wednesday, lifting Ellison’s net worth to about $391 billion. The total puts Ellison closer to dethroning Elon Musk as the world’s wealthiest individual. Forbes says Musk, 54, CEO of automaker Tesla, is worth just over $436 billion.
Ellison, 81, remains active in Oracle as chief technology officer and chairman. Rather than gradually sell off his position in the database software maker, he has maintained it, holding more than 1.1 million shares for over 25 years. His disciple Marc Benioff, who runs sales management software company Salesforce, has done the opposite, and now Benioff, 60, is worth about $10 billion. Musk’s share of Tesla has gone up thanks to generous pay packages, and the value of his SpaceX holding has multiplied in the past decade.
In 2022, Ellison stepped down from the Tesla board after almost four years, but he’s been keeping busy ever since.
He has sharpened his focus on the health-care industry with Oracle’s $28 billion acquisition of Cerner in 2022, he ramped up his philanthropy with the launch of the Ellison Institute of Technology at the University of Oxford in December and he helped complete the $8 billion Paramount Global-Skydance merger last month. Ellison has also become an arms dealer for artificial intelligence infrastructure, most significantly allying Oracle with ChatGPT provider OpenAI.
On Tuesday, Oracle said that its remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, now stood at $455 billion, up 359% from last year. Oracle also said its cloud infrastructure revenue stands to jump from $10 billion in the most recent fiscal year to $144 billion in fiscal 2030.
“Clearly, we had an amazing start to the year because Oracle has become the go-to place for AI workloads,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said at the beginning of Oracle’s earnings call on Tuesday, during which analysts competed to toss the highest compliments at her and Ellison. “We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD and many others.”
Meanwhile, Oracle has continued to grow in the sales of standard software.
“And by the way, we’re much bigger than Workday or ServiceNow. And we’re solving a larger portion of the problem,” Ellison told the analysts. ServiceNow and Workday were worth a combined $256 billion on Wednesday morning. Oracle’s market capitalization exceeded $950 billion. Only nine companies on the S&P 500 index are worth more.
Ellison has long been a supporter of President Donald Trump, donating to his campaigns and helping him raise outside money. The relationship offers a potential business benefit to the Oracle co-founder.
Trump has been delaying the sale of TikTok’s U.S. business, and said in January that he’d be open to ByteDance selling that business to Musk, who previously worked for the administration, or to Ellison.
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