Meet The Man Who Surpassed Elon Musk As The Richest Man In The World For A Day

Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, overtook Elon Musk as the world’s richest man for a day.

According to Forbes, Ellison’s net worth reached $387.6 billion on 11 September, though Bloomberg placed him at $400.9 billion after Oracle shares jumped in value. Musk’s wealth sits at around $437.4 billion, but fluctuations in Tesla stock meant Ellison’s single-day surge pushed him into the top spot earlier this week.

Ellison became the second person in history to cross the $400 billion mark. The leap in his fortune came after Oracle shares went up 38% in a single morning, the biggest single-day increase ever recorded for an individual billionaire. His personal stake in Oracle is around 41%, built up over decades of holding onto his shares while the company carried out stock buybacks worth $142 billion since 2011.

At 81 years old, Ellison has spent nearly half a century working on Oracle’s growth. He ran the company as chief executive from its founding in 1977 until 2014, when he stepped aside to become chief technology officer. From then until now, he has continued to tie his wealth directly to Oracle’s performance.

 

How Did Oracle’s Stock Go So High?

 

The jump came after Oracle reported quarterly results that actually fell short of market expectations. Despite that, investors reacted to the company’s projections for cloud revenue tied to AI. Oracle expects income from cloud infrastructure to go from $18 billion this year to $144 billion over the next 4 years.

That growth is fuelled in part by clients such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, who are also rivals. Even smaller competitors like CoreWeave have been tied to the same market. Oracle is also part of the Trump-backed Stargate project, a $500 million data centre venture involving OpenAI and Softbank in Abilene, Texas.

Ellison said on the company’s earnings call that Oracle would build and operate more data centres than its competitors combined. He has often stressed Oracle’s reach across industries, from healthcare and government to finance and telecommunications.

 

What Has Increased Ellison’s Personal Fortune?

 

Ellison’s wealth increase has been amplified through Oracle’s stock buybacks. In 2009, he owned about 22% of the company. A series of share repurchases since then nearly doubled his stake to 41%. Because he rarely sold shares, his wealth grew in line with the shrinking pool of Oracle stock available on the market.

Oracle also pays out dividends and Ellison receives about $500 million every quarter. In the last year alone, he took in around $2 billion through dividends. In addition, he has pledged 277 million Oracle shares, worth about $93 billion, as collateral for loans. This practice gives him liquidity without forcing him to sell.

Although Oracle carries $92 billion in debt and expects 3 years of negative free cash flow due to its investment in AI infrastructure, the company has maintained its commitment to dividends and smaller share buybacks. Chief executive Safra Catz said Oracle would keep prioritising stock repurchases and dividends alongside its borrowing strategy.

 

 

What Does Oracle Do?

 

Oracle has grown into one of the largest software and hardware companies in the world. Founded in California in 1977 as Software Development Laboratories, it released the first commercial relational database using SQL two years later. In 1982, it changed its name to Oracle.

The company has a whole range of products, from Oracle Database and Java to Oracle Linux and Solaris. It has also acquired companies such as PeopleSoft, Sun Microsystems, NetSuite and Cerner to increase its reach. Its software is used in sectors from healthcare and finance to government and telecommunications.

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure is now its fastest growing business. Known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, it supports everything from AI to big data analytics. Its customers use it for storage, automation, application development and running larger business systems.

 

Who Is Larry Ellison Outside Of Oracle?

 

Ellison’s personal life adds to the intrigue around his wealth. In 2012, he bought almost the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai for $300 million and later moved there permanently in 2020. He has four children and is currently based between Lanai and Woodside, California.

He has also been active outside Oracle when he served on Tesla’s board from 2018 to 2022 and owned about 45 million shares before stepping down. In 2025, Ellison also became a spoken of name in media after taking nearly 50% of Paramount Skydance, a merger valued at $28 billion involving his son David’s Skydance studio.

Ellison never finished university because he dropped out of both the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago before starting work on databases for the CIA. That project laid the foundation for Oracle, which became the first company to release a commercial SQL-based relational database in the United States.