Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison on Wednesday eclipsed Elon Musk to become the richest person in the world for a brief moment, according to data in a Bloomberg report.
Musk was back on the number 1 spot on the list of the world’s richest persons at the time of writing of this report, according to Forbes.
Ellison, 81, had left Mark Zuckerberg behind to occupy the spot for the world’s second richest individual in July, with his net worth now approaching the Musk’s.
With Oracle shares surging to a record in aftermarket trading after the company released its quarterly results, its co-founder and biggest shareholder Ellison’s net worth received a $70 billion boost, reaching $364 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Ellison’s move upwards was propelled by the stock surges in Oracle, whose shares gained the most since 1992, surging as much as 43 per cent on Wednesday mid-morning in New York. This brought the company’s market valuation to $969 billion.
This came even as Oracle put forward an aggressive outlook for its cloud business, thus helping the company establish itself in the race to support the demand for artificial intelligence computing, Bloomberg reported.
Oracle, seen as one of the software giants, is famed for its namesake database, which supports some of the world’s largest corporate operations.
Ellison’s company has, over the past few years, invested billions of dollars to establish itself in the competitive market of cloud infrastructure, dominated by giants like Amazon.com Inc, Bloomberg reported. Oracle offers computing power and storage over the internet.
With startups and others AI firms seeking more capacity, the firm has been on the beneficial side of the buyers’ enthusiasm for artificial intelligence.
At the beginning of this month, Oracle’s share price had tripled, since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. The shares hit an all-time high on September 9. This came a couple of months after the company signed a commitment with OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company, for 4.5 gigawatts’ worth of data center capacity.
Ellison’s relationship with US President Trump
Ellison, who also owns a stake in Musk’s electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc, also shares a close relationship with United States President Donald Trump. He is known to be a Trump supporter, and has been a Republican donor for several years.
Trump has included Ellison and his company Oracle in a $500 billion AI infrastructure project named Stargate, which he first confirmed at the start of this year. Since his return to office for a second term, the US President has elevated Oracle multiple times, according to Bloomberg.
Trump has been vocal in his support for Oracle acquiring a partial stake in TikTok, which could provide the company a share in one of the world’s most popular consumer products. While Oracle’s bid has seen approval by Trump, the Chinese government has not yet given its nod on it.
