Oracle’s stock surged by 41% on Wednesday, propelling co-founder Larry Ellison to the top of Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
The company’s shares rose to $341.77 at the time of writing, lifting its market value from $678bn to $960bn. Ellison, who owns 41 per cent of Oracle, saw his personal wealth climb to $397bn, overtaking Elon Musk’s $384bn.
Elon Musk first rose to the top of the world’s wealth rankings in 2021, before ceding the position to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault.
He regained the title last year and maintained it for just over 300 days.
Larry Ellison, 81, co-founder and now chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, derives most of his fortune from his substantial stake in the software company.
The sharp rally followed Oracle’s quarterly results released on Tuesday evening.
Chief executive Safra Catz described it as an “astonishing quarter,” highlighting four multibillion-dollar contracts with three customers.
The group’s bookings reached $455bn for the three months to August, far exceeding analysts’ expectations and up significantly from $138bn in the prior period.
AI and cloud partnerships drive growth
Oracle has been reshaping its business model, shifting towards cloud services and data centre infrastructure to meet surging demand from artificial intelligence companies.
The company has signed agreements with major players including OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI.
Earlier this year, Oracle joined forces with OpenAI and SoftBank on the $500bn Stargate project, further cementing its role as a key supplier of computing power for AI model development.
Wall Street had anticipated strong bookings following news of a $30bn annual contract with OpenAI, but the steep acceleration in commitments surprised many.
According to Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss, Oracle’s $332bn in new bookings marked “not only the biggest bookings number we’ve ever seen in software, but a fundamental shift in the business model towards data centre operator.”
Scaling up to meet AI demand
While Oracle has entered the cloud race later than rivals such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, its focus on AI-related workloads has quickly elevated its position in the market.
Catz predicted Oracle’s infrastructure revenue would rise from $18bn this year to $144bn within five years, nearly 60 per cent above Wall Street forecasts.
By comparison, Amazon Web Services reported revenue of $107bn in its last fiscal year.
The company also increased its capital spending forecast for the fiscal year ending May 2025 by $10bn to $35bn.
Catz emphasised Oracle’s ability to generate higher returns with less investment than competitors, attributing the efficiency to leaner infrastructure spending.
Nevertheless, the rapid pace of growth has raised questions about capacity.
Analysts warn that scaling up computing power quickly could prove difficult at a time when chip shortages continue to affect the industry.
Major cloud providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, are projected to spend more than $350bn this year on AI data centres and over $400bn in 2026.
Ellison also highlighted a growing challenge in the AI industry: a shortage of capacity for inferencing, the process of running AI models after training.
“The inferencing market is much larger than the training market,” he told analysts.
For the latest quarter, Oracle reported revenue of $14.9bn, up 12 per cent year-on-year but slightly below expectations of $15bn.
Adjusted net income rose 8 per cent to $4.3bn, ahead of forecasts.
With record bookings, high-profile AI partnerships, and a sharp rise in market valuation, Oracle has firmly positioned itself as a central player in the AI infrastructure boom—while elevating Ellison to the world’s richest person.
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