Larry Ellison Becomes World's Richest as Oracle Stock Soars 40%

Sep, 11 2025

A $101 billion day that stunned Wall Street

In one trading session, Larry Ellison added an eye-watering $101 billion to his fortune and moved past Elon Musk to become the world’s richest person. His estimated net worth hit $393 billion on September 10, 2025, after Oracle shares rocketed 40% to $338 following a growth forecast that blindsided even bullish analysts.

That single-day leap is the largest on record for the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The math behind it is simple: Ellison owns roughly 1.16 billion Oracle shares, and when the stock jumps hard, his paper wealth moves in lockstep. He’s 81, still Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer, and still fixated on engineering and the product roadmap that got him here.

So what changed? Oracle told investors it sees faster growth ahead, especially in areas that matter right now—cloud infrastructure and database subscriptions tied to AI and data-heavy workloads. The forecast suggested momentum is not a one-quarter blip but the result of multi-year bets finally paying off.

Five decades of building—and a late-career pivot that hit

Ellison’s rise didn’t come out of nowhere. Born in 1944, he cofounded the company that would become Oracle in 1977 and ran it as CEO until 2014. He then shifted to CTO and chairman, a move that let him burrow deeper into the technology while Safra Catz took the CEO role. The through line: keep Oracle’s database essential to business computing, then rebuild the company’s future around the cloud.

Oracle’s database has long been the backbone of banks, telecoms, retailers, and governments. That base pays for the next bet—first on big-ticket enterprise applications, then on cloud infrastructure. The strategy included a buying spree over two decades: PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems (which brought Java under Oracle’s roof), and later NetSuite. More recently, the Cerner deal in 2022 pushed Oracle deep into healthcare data, a sector where reliability, privacy, and analytics are mission-critical.

The company’s pitch today is blunt: the world’s data is exploding, and AI needs fast, secure access to it. Oracle sells not just databases, but a place to run them—its cloud (OCI), tuned for high-performance workloads and increasingly for AI training and inference. The more enterprise customers move their data into Oracle’s cloud or keep it close via hybrid setups, the harder it becomes to switch. That stickiness shows up in long-term contracts and a swelling backlog, which is exactly the kind of visibility investors like to see.

Oracle is not the biggest cloud player. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google still lead in scale. But Oracle has carved out a niche by focusing on performance, price predictability, and multicloud deals that let customers run Oracle databases alongside other clouds. That pragmatism has won converts—especially among companies racing to stand up AI projects without rebuilding their core data architecture from scratch.

Ellison’s personal wealth tells the same story in numbers. His stake in Oracle was about 42.9% as of late 2022, a concentration that magnifies every rally. He bought 3 million Tesla shares and joined the carmaker’s board in 2018, then left the board in August 2022; as of June 2023, he still held roughly a 1.4% Tesla stake. Outside tech, he owns 98% of Lānaʻi, the sixth-largest Hawaiian island—a display of the sprawling, sometimes head-turning scale of his investments.

He also funds big, ambitious side projects. Project Ronin, a software startup aiming to transform cancer care by extracting insight from messy medical records, launched with prominent partners but shut down in 2024. The lesson is familiar in Ellison’s world: take swings at hard problems, accept the misses, double down on what works.

If you want the short version of how he got here, here it is:

• Bet early—and kept betting—on databases as the core of enterprise computing.
• Used acquisitions to fill product gaps and control key technologies (like Java).
• Pushed Oracle into cloud infrastructure while defending its software franchises.
• Leaned into performance and cost advantages rather than chasing cloud scale at all costs.

All of that explains the sudden wealth spike. Oracle’s forecast suggests that customers aren’t just testing AI—they’re deploying it, and many of those deployments run on Oracle databases and, increasingly, Oracle’s cloud. When investors reprice that future in a single session, the owner of 1.16 billion shares gets a very loud notification.

There’s also the human arc. Ellison grew up in Chicago, studied briefly at the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, moved to California, and worked as a programmer before cofounding the company that would become Oracle. Early contracts—famously including a CIA project code-named “Oracle”—set the tone. The firm survived a financial scare in the early 1990s, cleaned up its sales practices, and then roared back with internet-era products (9i, 10g) that cemented its database lead. He financed and won America’s Cup titles with Oracle Team USA, wrote big checks to research and education through his foundation, and joined the Giving Pledge in 2010.

Today’s result is a reminder about market reality: these rankings are snapshots. Bloomberg’s list reflects market prices. If Oracle’s stock cools, Ellison’s top spot can vanish as quickly as it arrived. That said, a one-day, triple-digit-billion gain doesn’t usually happen without a deeper shift in how investors view a company’s long-term earnings power. The market is effectively saying Oracle’s AI-and-data positioning looks more durable than it did a week ago.

What should you watch next? First, whether Oracle’s cloud growth—particularly in workloads tied to AI—keeps accelerating through the next few quarters. Second, margins. Building data centers and lining up cutting-edge chips is expensive; the payoff shows up if utilization stays high and software attach rates rise. Third, Cerner. Healthcare is a data labyrinth. If Oracle can make healthcare records easier to query at scale—and keep regulators onside—the upside stretches for years.

There’s also an architectural shift underway across big tech: multicloud. Rather than pick a single provider, large companies combine them. Oracle’s Database@Azure, announced in 2023, is a template for that kind of partnership—let the database stay where it runs best, near the apps that need it, even if the surrounding compute lives elsewhere. Moves like this lower switching costs for customers and expand Oracle’s addressable market without a winner-takes-all fight.

Ellison’s personal style hasn’t changed much. He can be combative onstage, obsessive about performance, and deeply involved in product details. That combination has made him a fixture in Silicon Valley and, at times, a foil to it. For fans, he’s proof that old-guard enterprise software still sets the rules for how modern AI and analytics get done at scale.

The wealth, of course, is more than stock. Real estate, yachts, and an island few can find on a map without squinting are part of the picture. But the engine is Oracle. The company’s decades-long push to sit at the center of the world’s data—first in on-premise servers, now in the cloud—continues to define Ellison’s fortune. If that bet keeps paying, the richest-person title could stick around. If not, expect the leaderboard to reshuffle. Either way, the market just sent a clear signal about where it thinks the next big profits in enterprise tech will come from.