Larry Ellison (Oracle) dethrones Elon Musk as the richest person in the world
The tech giant's shares have soared more than 40% on the stock market due to the positive outlook.
BarcelonaTycoon Elon Musk is no longer the richest person in the world, a title he has managed to hold for nearly a year. It was Larry Ellison, co-founder of the software company Oracle, who, after his company's shares soared 42% on the stock market on Wednesday, has snatched Musk's throne. The 81-year-old Oracle chairman had held second place since Tuesday, when he surpassed Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) in the ranking.
According to Bloomberg, Ellison's wealth increased from $101 billion to $393 billion after Oracle's incredible earnings report on Tuesday night, surpassing Musk's net worth of $385,000.
The results
Shares in Ellison's software company soared during trading on Wednesday after the company published its results on Tuesday (on closed trading): it posted a net profit of $2.927 billion (equivalent to €2.496 billion at the current exchange rate) for its first fiscal quarter, which ended one year ago.
Revenues amounted to $14.926 billion (€12.73 billion), an increase of 12.2%. By division, cloud computing generated $7.186 billion (€6.129 billion), an increase of 27.8%, and software, $5.721 billion (€4.879 billion), a decrease of 0.8%. The services area generated $1.349 billion (€1.151 billion), and the machinery area generated another $670 million (€571.4 million), an increase of 6.8% and 2.3%, respectively.
"In the first quarter, we signed four multi-million-dollar contracts with three different customers. This resulted in a 359% increase in our backlog, reaching $455 billion [€388.056 billion]. It's been an amazing quarter, and the demand for Oracle Safra Catz's cloud infrastructure has been growing.
Thus, Oracle's positive outlook boosted its share price by 41.76% at five o'clock in the afternoon in Spain on the New York Stock Exchange, to $342.37 (292 euros per share). Ellison is Oracle's largest individual shareholder and, according to Bloomberg, the executive's increase in wealth is the "largest single-day increase ever recorded" by the index.
AI, the boost
More and more companies are jumping on the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon, and Oracle has become a powerhouse in this technology, taking advantage of the boom of other giants like Nvidia and Microsoft. In fact, the most valuable companies in the S&P 500—the index composed of the 500 largest companies in the United States—are all technology companies with some future commitment to AI or with some branch of business focused on this technology. In the last six months alone, coinciding with the peak of AI, Oracle's shares have climbed almost 130%, and the announcement of upcoming contracts in this sector has spurred investors.