New York (AFP) – Billionaire Elon Musk is at risk of losing his title as the world’s wealthiest person to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose software giant appears poised for massive AI riches through a major deal with OpenAI. Ellison, 81, amassed about $95 billion in additional wealth Wednesday as Oracle shares skyrocketed after the nearly 50-year-old company forecast massive revenue growth thanks to large contracts that will dwarf current revenue. That rise lifted Ellison’s overall fortune to nearly $390 billion compared with Musk’s roughly $436 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires index. A Bloomberg wealth index placed Ellison’s bounty slightly ahead of Musk’s, designating the Oracle chief number one at the moment. The difference in the tallies relates to how some of their huge holdings are estimated.
Ellison and Musk are close friends, with the Oracle boss often coming to Musk’s aid during challenging periods in the Tesla tycoon’s career. He invested over $1 billion in Musk’s buyout of Twitter and served on Tesla’s board for many years. Musk’s most easily estimated holding is Tesla, whose shares have fallen in 2025 amid languishing sales attributed partly to Musk’s embrace of far-right political causes. Tesla earlier this month unveiled a compensation proposal for Musk that could top $1 trillion through 2035 if the company hits ambitious targets. Shareholders will vote on the plan in November.
Ellison, a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, holds more than 1.1 billion shares of Oracle, accounting for more than 40 percent of the company’s equity, according to S&P Capital IQ. Oracle CEO Safra Catz called the just-finished quarter “astonishing” as the company signed “four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers.” Oracle projected that its cloud business revenues would grow 77 percent in the current fiscal year to $18 billion. In subsequent years, revenues are expected to rise to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion.
The bulk of Oracle’s new contracts comes from an agreement for OpenAI to purchase some $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter. The publication described Oracle’s contract with OpenAI as a “risky gamble” for both companies that will likely require Oracle to take on additional debt to finance the AI chips. The contract will also tie Oracle’s future to the fate of a single company, the Journal said.
On a conference call Tuesday, Ellison described the company as well positioned to be a dominant force in “AI inferencing,” where the technology will lead to a more profound level of automation affecting everything from assessing medical lab results to placing bets in financial markets. “AI is going to automatically write the computer programs that will then automate your sales processes and your legal processes and everything else in your factories and so on,” said Ellison, who emphasized the appeal of adopting the new AI capabilities to Oracle’s legacy business around secure management of proprietary company data.
Ellison built his fortune through Oracle, which he founded in 1977 as a data server provider for the CIA, among others. Early on, the company competed with Microsoft, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to provide the data infrastructure for the emerging digital economy. Ellison, who publicly sparred in earlier years with Bill Gates and other technology leaders, has also been known for heavy investments in professional sailing, with his Oracle team winning the America’s Cup in both 2010 and 2013. In 2009, Ellison became the owner of both the Indian Wells Tennis Garden and BNP Paribas Open, near Palm Springs, California, which is sometimes referred to as tennis’ unofficial “fifth Grand Slam.” Oracle shares finished up 36 percent at $328.33, translating into a market value of around $922 billion.
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