There are just over 3,000 billionaires on the planet. So when one of them jumps past Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, it’s a moment.
On Tuesday, July 1, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison secured the No. 2 spot on Forbes’ real-time billionaire rankings, sitting just behind Elon Musk with an estimated net worth fluctuating between $262 billion and $282 billion, depending on Oracle’s stock. That leap came after Oracle’s stock popped 32% in June, driven by an earnings report that crushed expectations.
The 80-year-old tech tycoon owns about 40% of Oracle, and the company’s booming AI-powered cloud business is fueling a new wave of investor hype. “Oracle’s future is bright in this new era of cloud computing,” Ellison said last week. “It’s just the beginning.”
The earnings call dropped June 11, and Oracle reported $57.4 billion in fiscal revenue and $1.70 EPS, beating Wall Street predictions. In the two days that followed, Ellison’s fortune spiked more than $40 billion, including a $25B surge on Thursday and another $16B on Friday.
Bloomberg still lists Zuckerberg slightly ahead — about $253 billion to Ellison’s $248 billion — but Forbes puts Ellison firmly in second. Either way, he’s now comfortably ahead of Bezos, 61, whose fortune hovers between $235 and $241 billion.
Wall Street insiders say the next year could be even bigger. TD Cowen’s Derrick Wood called Oracle’s current momentum a “major inflection point” as AI demand explodes. With that kind of energy, Ellison might not be done climbing.
For the cloud kingpin to topple the world’s richest man — a.k.a. Musk — he’d have to close a gap of about $125 billion. But despite the numbers, there doesn’t appear to be any bad blood between the two.
“I’m very close friends with Elon Musk, and I’m a big investor in Tesla,” Ellison said during a 2018 call with analysts.
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