US tech billionaire, Larry Ellison has overtaken Elon Musk as the world’s richest person after shares in Oracle, the company he co-founded, rose sharply in early trading on Wednesday.
Ellison’s fortune climbed after Oracle reported financial results that beat expectations.
Shares jumped more than 40% to $340 each, valuing the software company at $958bn (£707bn). Ellison, who holds a 41% stake, saw his share rise to $393bn, edging past Musk’s $384bn, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.
It was Oracle’s biggest single-day share increase on record and the largest one-day gain ever tracked on the Bloomberg wealth index. Ellison and Musk remain far ahead of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Ellison’s wealth is not limited to Oracle. He holds a stake in Tesla, where Musk is chief executive, owns a sailing team, the Indian Wells Open tennis tournament, and the Hawaiian island of Lanai, Bloomberg reported.
The two men have close ties. Ellison sat on Tesla’s board between 2018 and 2022 and invested $1bn in Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now called X.
According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, when asked to back the Twitter deal, Ellison replied he would contribute a billion dollars or “whatever you recommend”. Musk is also said to visit Ellison’s island frequently.
Ellison is a supporter of Donald Trump and has appeared with the former president at the White House, including during the launch of the $500bn Stargate project aimed at building US artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Musk, who initially had a strong relationship with Trump, has also been a visible supporter of his 2024 campaign, though the relationship cooled earlier this year.
Oracle’s growth has been fuelled by rising demand from AI firms for its cloud services. These services supply computing power to companies like ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which require large-scale datacentres to run their systems.
Musk, who heads Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, first became the world’s richest person in 2021, before losing and regaining the title. After just over 300 days back at the top, he has now been overtaken by Ellison, who is 81.
(The Guardian)
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