Oracle founder earns $15 billion in one day

Oracle founder Larry Ellison posted a $15 billion gain on Tuesday, after shares of his software company had their best day in more than two years and closed at a record high.

Ellison, who founded Oracle in 1977, remains the company’s largest shareholder with a stake estimated at $146 billion after the latest surge in wealth. He also became the fifth richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine, behind Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and before Warren Buffett.

According to CNBC, Oracle shares rose 12% to close at $127.54, after the software vendor announced third-quarter financial profits that exceeded analysts’ expectations. Revenue from the company’s cloud services and licensing support segment rose 12%, beating estimates.

While technology company Oracle has been a latecomer to cloud infrastructure and has been on the sidelines of the latest AI boom, the growing demand for the company’s AI technology has allowed Ellison to promote his company’s expansion into the technology industry’s hottest market.

“We’re building an AI data center in the United States where you can park eight Boeing airplanes,” said 80-year-old Ellison, who still works as Oracle’s chief technology officer.

“The 747s are nose-to-tail in this data center,” the New York native added during the earnings call, revealing, “We are building large numbers of data centers, some of which are small, and others are the largest artificial intelligence data centers in the world.”

Over the past year, Oracle shares have risen by 52%, raising Ellison’s wealth by about $50 billion. The stock has outperformed the S&P 500, which is up 34% in the past 12 months.

Unlike Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison held on to all of his shares rather than selling portions of them. According to FactSet, Ellison’s last transaction in Oracle stock was a purchase of 7,000 shares in 2022, and he has not sold any shares since 2016.

Bezos sold more than 50,000 shares of Amazon stock this year. Most recently, in mid-February, he unloaded more than 14 million shares of his company worth approximately $2.4 billion.