Friend of Elon Musk overtakes Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg as second richest person on Earth
A friend of Elon Musk has overtaken both Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to become the second richest person on Earth.
The co-founder of Oracle, which is an American multinational computer tech company, has swiped the spot as the second wealthiest person in the world.
Larry Ellison has seen his firm soar in stock value in recent days, with Oracle stock rising by 13% on Thursday (June 12), followed by another 7% on Friday (June 13), jumping to a record breaking $215 per share for the company.
In turn, this has caused Ellison’s own net worth to skyrocket by over $40 billion, according to Forbes.
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According to the outlet’s billionaire list, this means that the tech mogul is now sitting on a wealth of $254.6 billion as of writing this (June 17).
The only person on Earth currently richer than Ellison is his long-time pal Musk, who is worth a whopping $412.9 billion.
Why is Oracle stock seeing a rise?
Oracle has seen the big increase as a result of an earnings report published last Wednesday (June 11).
In the report, it revealed that the company has had stronger profits in its last quarter than what was initially expected.
Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick said: “When Larry Ellison speaks of entering a new era of cloud computing, all should pay careful attention.”
In the filing of the earnings report, Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle, said: “FY25 was a very good year—but we believe FY26 will be even better as our revenue growth rates will be dramatically higher.
“We expect our total cloud growth rate—applications plus infrastructure—will increase from 24% in FY25 to over 40% in FY26. Cloud Infrastructure growth rate is expected to increase from 50% in FY25 to over 70% in FY26. And RPO is likely to grow more than 100% in FY26.
“Oracle is well on its way to being not only the world's largest cloud application company—but also one of the world's largest cloud infrastructure companies.”
Ellison also commented on the results, sharing: “MultiCloud database revenue from Amazon, Google and Azure grew 115% from Q3 to Q4.
“We currently have 23 MultiCloud data centers live with 47 more being built over the next 12 months.”
He added: “Overall Oracle Cloud Infrastructure consumption revenue grew 62% in Q4. We expect OCI consumption revenue to grow even faster in FY26. OCI revenue growth rates are skyrocketing—so is demand.”