Larry Ellison surpasses Elon Musk as world’s richest person

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison unseated Elon Musk as the world’s richest person Wednesday, taking the title after the company’s stock soared around 40% in a single day.

The wealth of Ellison, a close friend of Musk and a former Tesla board member, surged by more than $100 billion on the stock gains and led him to unseat the Tesla CEO in the rankings, according to Bloomberg, which tracks the wealth of the world’s 500 richest people.

The enterprise software giant, where the 81-year-old Ellison is chairman and chief technology officer, announced skyrocketing growth to its cloud computing business this week as it delivered an earnings report for the quarter that ended Aug. 31. Citing the vast expansion and embrace of artificial intelligence tools, the company revised its revenue forecasts upward.

“AI Changes Everything,” Ellison said in a statement, after noting that “MultiCloud database revenue from Amazon, Google and Microsoft grew at the incredible rate of 1,529% in (fiscal) Q1,” referring to a key component of the company’s cloud infrastructure offerings.

Musk’s vast wealth has ebbed and flowed over the past year as his involvement in the Trump administration – and blowback to the U.S. DOGE Service cost-cutting group he oversaw – ignited a fierce backlash to the electric vehicle company he leads. That did not, however, stop Tesla’s board from proposing a $1 trillion compensation package for Musk to lead the company over the next decade earlier this month.

Musk has dominated the wealth tables since early 2021, though he has at times since then been surpassed by figures including Bernard Arnault, CEO and chairman of French luxury retail giant LVMH, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.