The battle amongst billionaires for bragging rights because the world’s richest particular person bought heated Wednesday with the shocking surge of an outdated contender: Larry Ellison.
In a surprising jiffy after markets opened, inventory in Ellison’s Oracle Corp. rocketed greater than a 3rd, sufficient for him to briefly wrest the title from its longtime holder Elon Musk and hand it to the software program big’s co-founder.
However the inventory market is fickle, and Musk was again on high by the tip of the day, not less than in response to Bloomberg, as Oracle gave up a little bit of its earlier features.
For these preserving rating, the distinction now’s a billion, which isn’t a lot given the scale of the figures: Musk’s $384.2 billion versus $383.2 billion for Ellison.
The dueling fortunes are so large every might fund the life of 5 million typical American households for a yr, about all the inhabitants of Florida, permitting them to all give up their jobs. Or they might simply inform all of South Africa to take a trip for yr and produce nothing, based mostly on its gross home product.
The transient change within the rating got here after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle powered by multibillion greenback orders from clients because the artificial-intelligence race heats up.
Musk grew to become the world’s richest particular person for the primary time 4 years in the past. An enormous purpose is his stake in a sizzling, however now cooling, electrical automobile maker, Tesla.
Inventory within the firm has been shifting in the other way of Oracle’s, dropping 14% to this point this yr. Musk additionally controls a number of personal corporations, together with rocket maker SpaceX, his synthetic intelligence firm xAI and the previous Twitter, now known as X.
Ellison owns about 40% of Oracle, which implies its surging inventory added $100 billion to his internet value in little over a half-hour after the inventory market opened.
The evening earlier than, after buying and selling had closed, the corporate introduced in an earnings report that it had struck greater than $300 billion value of recent offers, together with contracts with the OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia and Musk’s xAI. It mentioned that it now expects income from its cloud infrastructure enterprise to leap 77% to $18 billion this fiscal yr. then rise to $144 billion in 4 years after that.
Ellison mentioned in an earnings name that Oracle wouldn’t simply be earning profits from its computing facilities that assist construct the subsequent chatbots, however from the day-to-day working of these AI programs to run robots in factories, design medicine in laboratories, place bets in monetary markets and automate authorized and gross sales work at corporations.
In different phrases, Ellison’s surge in wealth Wednesday morning mirrored investor expectations that computer systems will take over many roles now executed by people — and Oracle will profit.
Or because the 81-year-old mentioned on the decision, “AI Changes Everything.”
Musk is hoping the identical for Tesla and his personal internet value, however he’s been struggling to persuade buyers.
The corporate had been promising an enormous turnaround in electrical automobile gross sales after they fell sharply earlier this yr, however the bounce again hasn’t occurred. Musk has been downplaying the unhealthy numbers by attempting to shift buyers’ focus to Tesla’s different enterprise of creating robots and advances within the synthetic intelligence behind its automobiles and robotaxis.
Tesla gross sales within the European Union plunged 40% earlier this summer season, the seventh month in row of drops, as clients balked at shopping for his automobiles after he took to X to assist excessive right-wing politicians there. The corporate has been dropping market share within the U.S., too, as consumers offended along with his embrace of Donald Trump have stayed away from Tesla showrooms.
Oracle inventory closed Wednesday at $328.33, a 36% soar. Tesla was up lower than 1% at $347.79.
—-
AP writers Matt O’Brien in Windfall, R.I., and Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this story.
Fortune World Discussion board returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and international leaders will collect for a dynamic, invitation-only occasion shaping the way forward for enterprise. Apply for an invite.
