Elon Musk briefly lost his position as the world’s richest person to Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and a close ally of United States President Donald Trump.
Ellison’s fortune climbed to $393bn (£290bn) on Wednesday morning, overtaking Musk’s $385bn (£284bn), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The surge followed a sharp rise of more than 40 percent in Oracle shares, driven by the company’s promising outlook for its cloud infrastructure business and a wave of artificial intelligence (AI) deals.
By the end of the day, however, Oracle’s share price had eased, returning Musk to the top of the global wealth rankings. Musk had held the title of world’s richest person for almost a year before Ellison’s brief takeover.
The Tesla boss is in line for a pay package worth over $1 trillion (£740bn) if he meets ambitious performance targets proposed by the electric carmaker’s board over the next decade. But Tesla shares have dropped this year as the company contends with investor unease over the Trump administration’s rollback of electric vehicle initiatives and public backlash to Musk’s political involvement.
Oracle, meanwhile, has been buoyed by the growing demand for data centre infrastructure. As part of its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, the company projected that revenue from its cloud business would rise 77 percent this year to $18bn, with more growth expected in the years ahead.
Oracle said demand from AI companies for its data centres had soared, and it signed four multibillion-dollar contracts in the last quarter, with more deals anticipated. “We expect several more in the months ahead,” the firm’s chief executive, Safra Catz, said.
Ellison, 81, co-founded Oracle in 1977 and gained prominence in the 1990s, becoming known for his extravagant lifestyle as much as the success of the database software company that built his fortune. He served as Oracle’s chief executive until 2014 and now holds the role of chairman and chief technology officer.
A long-time Trump supporter, Ellison appeared alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son when Trump returned to the White House in January to announce Stargate, a project aimed at building AI infrastructure in the US.
Oracle has also emerged as a possible buyer of TikTok, the Chinese-owned app threatened with a US ban unless its parent company ByteDance divests. Asked in January about the possibility of Musk buying TikTok, Trump said: “I’d like Larry to buy it, too.”
Ellison’s media ambitions go beyond TikTok. He financed most of his son David Ellison’s \$8bn bid to acquire Paramount, the parent company of CBS and MTV. That deal, involving Paramount and the media firm Skydance, closed last month.