Larry Ellison rockets past Elon Musk to No. 1 after Oracle’s AI-fueled moonshot

Larry Ellison just leapt to the top of the world’s wealth rankings, vaulting past Elon Musk on a single, jaw-dropping trading session. After Oracle’s blowout earnings and an even bolder AI forecast, Ellison’s fortune jumped about $101 billion to $393 billion, edging Musk’s $385 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. It’s the largest one-day wealth increase the index has ever recorded.

Oracle shares went vertical Wednesday—up roughly 40% by late morning ET—after the company said demand for its cloud infrastructure is exploding as AI customers hoover up data-center capacity. CEO Safra Catz told investors Oracle signed four multibillion-dollar contracts last quarter, with more on the way. The company is becoming a go-to builder and landlord for the compute-hungry AI crowd—right in Ellison’s wheelhouse as Oracle’s chairman, CTO and largest shareholder.

• Oracle has positioned itself as a core supplier of infrastructure that powers AI—servers, storage, networking—and the capacity to run large models at scale.
• In July, Oracle announced a deal to provide OpenAI with 4.5 gigawatts of electricity to run its AI software—an almost comically large number that underscores how power-intensive this arms race is.
• The company also flagged a backlog north of $450 billion for cloud services and laid out an aggressive multi-year growth path for its infrastructure business.

For a company with a market value just under $700 billion before the open—already the 13th most valuable in the US—a 40% pop is exceedingly rare. If momentum holds, Oracle will flirt with the $1 trillion club.

Ellison, 81, co-founded Oracle in 1977 and never really let go, keeping a massive personal stake that magnifies every move in the stock. When that stock goes vertical, so does his net worth. Bloomberg pegs his wealth at $393 billion after Wednesday’s surge, topping Musk for the first time this cycle.

Musk, for his part, has ruled the list on and off since 2021, powered by Tesla and SpaceX. He briefly ceded the crown to Bernard Arnault and Jeff Bezos in prior swings and could well regain it—these rankings are market weather vanes. Tesla shares are down this year, and although Musk’s controversial new Tesla pay package could be worth close to $1 trillion if sky-high milestones are met, those are big ifs.

Oracle’s rocket ride is the latest proof that the AI boom isn’t just about model makers. It’s about the plumbing—data centers, chips, power, and the cloud layers that orchestrate them. The same tailwind helped Nvidia become the world’s most valuable company (north of $4 trillion), with Microsoft briefly topping that level as well. Tech now dominates the top of the S&P 500; the eight most-valuable names all have deep AI exposure.

Ellison isn’t just a database legend; he’s built an empire that spills well beyond software:

• Owns 98% of Lanai, the Hawaiian island.
• Resuscitated the Indian Wells tennis tournament, often dubbed the sport’s “fifth slam.”
• Close ties to Donald Trump and periodic White House cameos for big-ticket tech and data-center pushes (including a splashy $500 billion data-center network proposal with SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman).
• The family business is branching out: son David Ellison led the $8 billion deal to take over Paramount Global, with significant Ellison family financing.

Oracle’s surge is tethered to AI infrastructure demand—and to the ability to deliver power, space and chips at scale. Any wobble in supply chains (or power availability) could clip growth. company’s massive contracted backlog needs to convert into recognized sales at the pace investors now expect.

For now, though, the database king has the crown, and AI’s gold rush just minted its latest (and richest) champion.

CNN, CNBC, NBC News, Bloomberg, and Axios contributed to this report.