Larry Ellison’s Oracle Gains $75 Billion in Paper Wealth as Stock Rallies 63%
Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison has gained roughly $75 billion in paper wealth as the software company he started in 1979 enjoyed its biggest stock rally since 1999 and the dot-com boom. Ellison’s net worth has ballooned to more than $217 billion, according to Forbes, behind only Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among the world’s richest people.
At 80, Ellison is a senior citizen in the tech industry, where his fellow billionaire founders are generally decades younger. However, he has found the fountain of youth both personally and professionally. After being divorced several times, Ellison was reported to be involved with a 33-year-old woman. He has also been as engaged as ever, mentioning offhand that the night before, he and his son were having dinner with his good friend Musk, who is advising President-elect Donald Trump.
Oracle’s big financial boon has come from its cloud infrastructure technology and its databases, which have made it more accessible. The company has maneuvered its way into the artificial intelligence craze, with OpenAI saying it will use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Oracle has also picked up business from Meta and startups, which often opt for market leader Amazon Web Services when picking a cloud.
Despite Oracle’s strong performance, the company came up short of analysts’ estimates and issued a forecast that was weaker than Wall Street was expecting. However, Ellison was bullish for the future, saying that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trains several of the world’s most important generative AI models because it is faster and less expensive than other clouds.
Oracle is expected to record revenue growth of about 10% for the current fiscal year, which would mark its second-strongest year of expansion since 2011. The company’s chairman, technology chief, and top shareholder has been working to find opportunities for expansion, including a partnership with Microsoft and a multi-cloud strategy.
Oracle’s challenge is to find opportunities for expansion, particularly in the cloud infrastructure market, where it lags behind Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. However, the company’s database software remains a stalwart, with Gartner estimating that Oracle had 17% market share in database management systems in 2023.
Ellison’s connection to Musk, who is set to co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, might benefit Oracle Health, the segment that came out of the company’s $28.2 billion acquisition of electronic health record software vendor Cerner in 2022. Oracle is also using AI to rewrite Cerner’s entire code base, which Ellison believes will be another pillar for growth.
Overall, Ellison’s Oracle has been a major beneficiary of the AI craze, with the company’s cloud infrastructure and databases making it more accessible to startups and enterprises alike. As the company continues to find opportunities for expansion, Ellison’s net worth is likely to continue to grow.
