Larry Ellison just had the biggest single-day wealth gain in history. The Oracle co-founder added over $100 billion to his net worth Wednesday after his company delivered stunning AI growth projections that sent shares soaring 36%. With $380 billion in personal holdings, the 81-year-old is now breathing down Elon Musk's neck for the title of world's richest person.
Wednesday's market close marked a historic moment in tech wealth concentration. Oracle shares rocketed nearly 36% after the database giant revealed it's become the infrastructure backbone for Silicon Valley's AI revolution, catapulting co-founder Larry Ellison's personal fortune past $380 billion in a single trading session.
The surge came on the heels of Oracle's Tuesday earnings call, where CEO Safra Catz delivered what can only be described as jaw-dropping growth projections. "We had an amazing start to the year because Oracle has become the go-to place for AI workloads," Catz told analysts, rattling off a client roster that reads like a who's who of artificial intelligence: OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, and AMD.
The numbers backing up that claim are staggering. Oracle's remaining performance obligations - essentially contracted revenue waiting to be recognized - exploded to $455 billion, a 359% jump from last year. But the real shocker came when the company projected its cloud infrastructure revenue would balloon from $10 billion in the most recent fiscal year to $144 billion by fiscal 2030. That's not growth - that's a complete transformation of Oracle's business model.
For Ellison, who has held onto his Oracle stake for over 25 years rather than diversifying like many tech founders, Wednesday's rally represents vindication of a contrarian strategy. While his former protégé Marc Benioff gradually sold down his Salesforce position and now sits at a "mere" $10 billion net worth, Ellison's unwavering commitment to Oracle has paid off spectacularly. His 1.1 million shares are now worth nearly as much as Tesla CEO Elon Musk's entire $437 billion fortune.
The wealth surge puts Ellison within striking distance of overtaking Musk as the world's richest individual - a position that seemed unthinkable just months ago when Oracle was still viewed primarily as a legacy database company trying to catch up in the cloud wars. Now, with Oracle's market capitalization exceeding $920 billion, only nine companies in the S&P 500 are worth more.
