Oracle founder Larry Ellison richest person in the world

Lawrence (Larry) Ellison, 81, became the wealthiest man on earth on Wednesday, at least for a short time. He replaced Elon Musk as the wealthiest man to date. Ellison is co-founder of the IT group now known as Oracle Corporation and executive chairman of its board of directors. Oracle's share price has risen sharply in recent trading days and shot up by up to 43% on Wednesday. Since Ellison owns more than 40 percent of all Oracle shares, his book value has also swelled accordingly.

At 10:10 a.m. New York time on Wednesday, Bloomberg took the measure and found that Oracle's share price had risen nearly 40 percent from Tuesday's close. Translated into Ellison's shares, this meant an increase in book value of 101 billion US dollars and first place in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (BBI). “This is the largest daily increase ever recorded by the index,” emphasizes the financial news service. It has published the BBI since March 2012.

Oracle's shares ultimately closed regular trading up 36 percent, which was still enough for Ellison's summit storm. It was Oracle's biggest share price jump this millennium.

Elon Musk was flushed to the top of the BBI for the first time in 2021. In between, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault, founder of the luxury brand company LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), were also at number one. Musk has been back on top for a good 300 days, but his huge fortune is mainly based on his shares in Tesla. Its share price has fallen by more than an eighth since the start of the year.

Huge cloud orders

The reason for the share price explosion is Oracle's financial figures published on Tuesday evening. In the first financial quarter of 2026, which covers the three months to the end of August 2025, revenue increased by twelve percent, operating profit by seven percent, operating cash flow by ten percent, and pre-tax profit by eight percent (in each case compared to the same quarter of the previous year). Net profit remained practically unchanged.

However, share buyers were enthusiastic about another key figure: the income that can realistically be expected in the future. “We signed four multi-billion dollar contracts with three different customers in the first quarter,” reported Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “That increased our RPO contract book by 359 percent to 455 billion dollars. It was an amazing quarter.”

RPO stands for Remaining Performance Obligations, i.e., the services Oracle still has to provide under contracts. Oracle does not yet have this income but can expect it. “And the demand for Oracle's cloud infrastructure continues to grow,” continued the manager. “We expect to sign contracts with several more multi-billion customers in the coming months.” This should multiply Oracle's annual turnover from the current 18 billion dollars to 144 billion dollars within five years.

Government contract drives share price

Both Ellison and Catz have excellent relationships with US President Donald Trump and other Republicans. Ellison has distinguished himself as a party donor, and Catz was only at the White House for dinner on Thursday, albeit not alone. The US president, his wife, and other Republicans were joined by numerous IT tycoons, including Sam Altman (OpenAI), Sergey Brin (Alphabet co-founder), Anna and Greg Brockman (OpenAI), Tim Cook (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder), Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Shyam Sankar (Palantir), Lisa Su (AMD), David Limp (Blue Origin), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Platforms).

The next day, Oracle's share price began to rise: 4.4 percent on Friday, 2.4 percent on Monday, 1.3 percent on Tuesday. Since the beginning of the year, the share price has risen by more than 45 percent and by more than 50 percent since the annual low on April 21. This was due in no small part to a huge order from the US government: Oracle will provide cloud services for the US General Services Administration (GSA).

Incidentally, the first significant Oracle customer was the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Oracle was founded on June 16, 1977, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL) by Ellison, Robert Miner, and Edward Oates. They developed a relational database for the DEC PDP-11 minicomputer. This appealed to the CIA: the computers were so handy that they could be used in airplanes and submarines, while at the same time the CIA had considerable amounts of data to manage.

The next three Oracle customers were also intelligence agencies: Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and finally the up-and-coming National Security Agency (NSA), which quickly became Oracle's largest customer. The first Oracle user conference in 1982 was attended by 50 people, 45 of them from “services.” Today, the stock market fantasy also speculates with further government contracts, but also with major orders from OpenAI, Temus, and TikTok.

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