Oracle’s Larry Ellison Overtakes Jeff Bezos as World’s Second-Richest Person
Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, has surpassed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to claim the No. 2 spot on the world’s richest list, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This shift is fueled by Oracle’s record-high stock price, which jumped 13% to $199.85 at Thursday’s close in New York.

The surge in Oracle’s stock price is attributed to the company’s forecasted 70% increase in cloud infrastructure sales for the fiscal year. Oracle is capitalizing on the AI boom by serving clients like OpenAI and experiencing unprecedented demand for its data center capacity. The company recently launched a joint venture called Stargate to supply OpenAI with significant computing power.
“Oracle is on its way to becoming one of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure companies,” said Oracle’s Chief Executive Officer, Safra Catz. The company’s remaining performance obligations, a key indicator of bookings, stand at $138 billion, up from $130 billion the prior quarter.
Ellison described an unprecedented order from a client, stating, “We recently got an order that said we’ll take all the capacity you have, wherever it is… we never got an order like that before.” To meet the growing demand, Oracle’s capital expenditures tripled to $21.2 billion for the year ended May 31, with plans to rise to $25 billion this year.
The AI boom has driven demand for data center capacity, with Oracle carving out a niche in AI-focused computing power, serving clients like Elon Musk’s xAI and Meta. Analyst Brent Thill noted that Catz’s long-term outlook, hinting at revenue acceleration, was the “exceptional” part of Oracle’s report, potentially driven by collaborations with Stargate and OpenAI.