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Oracle’s Larry Ellison briefly became the richest person in the world Wednesday, with shares of Oracle, the tech giant he co-founded, surging as much as 43%.
By the end of the trading day at 4 p.m. ET, Ellison’s wealth increased nearly $90 billion to a total of $383 billion, just shy of of Elon Musk’s fortune. The Tesla CEO, who has occupied the top spot, currently has a fortune of $384 billion, according to Bloomberg. The news outlet keeps tabs on the world’s wealthiest people with its billionaires index.
Behind Ellison and Musk in the rankings sit Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The rapid rise in Ellison’s wealth comes as he and his family push into artificial intelligence, media and politics.
Oracle’s stock move Wednesday was fueled primarily due to the company announcing a $450 billion-plus backlog for cloud services and multibillion-dollar computing contracts with major AI players Nvidia and ChatGPT backer OpenAI.
“Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers,” Oracle said. It expects that backlog of business will likely soon “exceed half-a-trillion dollars.”
The Ellison family further expanded its empire when Ellion’s son, David, recently completed an $8 billion takeover of CBS and MTV owner Paramount Global. That transaction was funded in part by $6 billion from the Ellison family fortune, CNBC reported.
Larry Ellison, a major backer of President Donald Trump, also recently visited the White House, announcing a massive datacenter project with Softbank’s chief Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
That project promised to use Oracle technology in creating the $500 billion network of datacenters.
Ellison, 81, co-founded Oracle more than 40 years ago. The company’s stock market value closed in on $1 trillion during Wednesday’s trading.
Steve Kopack is a senior reporter at NBC News covering business and the economy.
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