Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison has surged to the No. 2 spot on the global billionaire rankings, overtaking both Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, according to Bloomberg. With a net worth now pegged at $251 billion, Ellison trails only Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
The dramatic rise in Ellison’s fortune comes on the back of a massive rally in Oracle’s stock, driven by optimism around the company’s artificial intelligence and cloud computing prospects. Oracle shares jumped 32% in June, are up 90% in the past three months, and have nearly tripled in value since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Ellison, who still owns around 41% of Oracle, has seen his wealth swell by more than $56 billion this year alone. Over 80% of his fortune is tied directly to Oracle stock and options, cementing his status as one of the biggest winners of the ongoing AI boom.
The company’s recent earnings beat Wall Street estimates, signaling that Oracle’s cloud strategy is gaining traction. It has secured tens of billions of dollars in new cloud contracts and announced plans to build gigawatts of data center capacity to meet growing AI demand moves that put it in closer competition with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Ellison’s journey is a classic Silicon Valley story. A college dropout, he co-founded Oracle in 1977 with just $2,000 and served as CEO for 37 years, transforming it into one of the world’s largest software companies.
In recent years, Ellison has also increased his philanthropic efforts. He announced a renewed focus on the Ellison Institute of Technology, which aims to tackle global challenges including hunger, healthcare, and climate change.
With Oracle’s momentum showing no signs of slowing down, Ellison’s rise underscores a larger trend, the increasing dominance of enterprise tech in the AI era.
