Oracle’s Larry Ellison briefly became the richest person in the world Wednesday, with shares of Oracle, the tech giant he co-founded, surging as much as 43%.
By the end of the trading day at 4 p.m. ET (September 10), Ellison’s wealth increased nearly $90 billion to a total of $383 billion, just shy of of Elon Musk’s fortune. The Tesla CEO, who has occupied the top spot, currently has a fortune of $384 billion, according to Bloomberg. The news outlet keeps tabs on the world’s wealthiest people with its billionaires index.
Behind Ellison and Musk in the rankings sit Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The rapid rise in Ellison’s wealth comes as he and his family push into artificial intelligence, media and politics.
Oracle’s stock move Wednesday was fueled primarily due to the company announcing a $450 billion-plus backlog for cloud services and multibillion-dollar computing contracts with major AI players Nvidia and ChatGPT backer OpenAI.
