NEW YORK – In a seismic shift that has stunned the global financial community, Larry Ellison, the co-founder and Chairman of software titan Oracle, has officially overtaken Elon Musk to become the world's wealthiest person for the first time in his career. This breathtaking ascent follows a record-breaking single-day surge of $101 billion to his net worth.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the fortune of the 81-year-old Ellison has now reached an unprecedented $393 billion. This figure pushes him past the $385 billion net worth of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who has long dominated the top position on the wealth index.
The $101 billion single-day gain is not only a staggering sum but also marks the largest one-day increase ever recorded in the history of the index, underscoring the monumental scale of the event.
The Catalyst: An Artificial Intelligence (AI) Windfall
The primary driver behind Larry Ellison's historic leap was Oracle's latest quarterly earnings report, announced on the evening of September 9th. The results far exceeded all Wall Street expectations, particularly in its Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) division and its burgeoning portfolio of contracts related to Artificial Intelligence.
Specifically, Oracle announced massive new deals with other tech giants, including a significant agreement that will see Google's Gemini AI models deployed on Oracle's cloud platform. The company also revealed it had signed four multi-billion dollar contracts with three different clients in the past quarter alone.
The explosion in AI has created an insatiable demand for data center capacity and cloud infrastructure. Oracle, alongside major providers like Microsoft and Amazon, is directly benefiting from this wave. The market's reaction was immediate and explosive. Oracle's stock soared by as much as 41% in trading on September 10th, catapulting the company's market capitalization and Ellison's personal fortune to historic highs.
The Journey of a Silicon Valley Legend
Larry Ellison, born in 1944, is one of the pioneering figures of Silicon Valley. He co-founded Oracle in 1977 and transformed it from a small startup into a global enterprise software empire. Although he stepped down as CEO in 2014, he remains the company's Chairman and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), continuing to shape its strategy, especially in the critical race for the cloud and AI markets.
The vast majority of his wealth is tied to the more than 1.1 million Oracle shares he has held for over 25 years. Beyond Oracle, Ellison is a savvy investor with stakes in various sectors, including a notable tenure as a board member at Tesla from 2018 to 2022.
The Billionaire Race and the Volatility of Super-Wealth
Larry Ellison's dethroning of Elon Musk highlights the constant volatility at the pinnacle of the world's wealth rankings. For years, the top spot has been a contest primarily between Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault of LVMH, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
Ellison's rise, fueled by the core technology sectors of data infrastructure and AI, reasserts the immense importance of enterprise software in the modern economy. While Musk's fortune is heavily dependent on the fluctuating stock of Tesla and his audacious ventures like SpaceX, Ellison's ascent demonstrates the enduring power of a decades-proven tech business model, now revitalized by the AI revolution.
