Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, briefly surpassed Elon Musk as the world's richest person on Wednesday after Oracle shares surged over 40% in early trading. The spike followed better-than-expected financial results from the business software company, valuing Ellison's 41% stake at $393bn, just ahead of Musk's $384bn fortune, according to Bloomberg's billionaires index.
However, Ellison's lead was short-lived as Oracle shares closed at $328, a 36% rise, valuing his stake at $378bn and returning Musk to the top spot. The two tech billionaires sit comfortably ahead of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
Ellison, 81, also holds wealth from other sources, including a stake in Tesla, a sailing team, the Indian Wells Open tennis tournament, and an island in Hawaii. He has a close relationship with Musk, often described as a mentor, and served on Tesla's board from 2018 to 2022. Ellison also invested $1bn in Musk's purchase of Twitter, now rebranded as X.
Oracle accounts for the majority of Ellison's wealth, boosted by demand from AI companies for its cloud services, providing computing capacity for firms like OpenAI. Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, first became the world's richest person in 2021 and regained the title last year, but now faces renewed competition from Ellison.
