It’s lonely at the top, but Elon Musk now has company as Larry Ellison briefly eclipses him as the richest person in the world.
On Sept. 11, tech giant Oracle’s—a company that provides cloud infrastructure and integrated cloud applications to companies to manage data and operations—shares soared as high as 43 per cent, raising the company’s market valuation to $969 billion.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the surge catapulted Ellison’s fortune to $393 billion, surpassing Musk’s $384 billion.
The biggest one-day increase ever recorded put Ellison ahead of Musk for most of the day before the Tesla CEO edged back into pole position by a billion dollars.
The recent success for Oracle comes after a massive $300 billion deal signed with OpenAI titled Project Stargate. The project is a large-scale AI infrastructure undertaking that involves building out data-centre capacity, including 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, to support AI computation demands.
Oracle has reported a surge in demand among AI companies for its data centres, which helped push its stock drastically higher.
“[It] signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with customers in the last quarter and anticipates several more deals in the months ahead,” Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said during Oracle’s Q1 Fiscal year 2026 conference call.
The wealth rankings between industry titans like Ellison and Musk are watched, not just for spectacle, but for what they say about major shifts in the tech industry. Oracle, which has had a dominant market position in databases and infrastructure, has ramped up efforts in AI infrastructure, cloud computing, and long-term contract bookings in recent years. It signals an industry shift towards AI and increasing demand for computing power behind large AI models.
On the other hand, things haven’t been smooth sailing for Queen’s alum, Elon Musk, Comm ’94, this year.
Musk’s most valuable business, Tesla, has been grappling with investor jitters over the Trump administration’s electric vehicle rollback initiatives, alongside consumer backlash to Musk’s recent political involvement. There were even international ‘anti-Musk’ protests that took place at over 200 Tesla showrooms globally, with 50 in California alone, on what organizers called ‘Tesla Takedown’s Global Day of Action’ taking place on March 29.
However, the board of Tesla has proposed that Musk will receive a pay package worth over one trillion dollars if he accomplishes a set of ambitious goals within the next decade, including boosting Tesla’s value eightfold and selling another 12 million Tesla cars.
Under the plan, Musk would be awarded shares in 12 units, each tied to a market milestone. The first milestone is to double the market value of Tesla to two trillion dollars, the final milestone being $8.5 trillion.
Oracle, a tech start-up founded in the ’70s, had long faded from tech prominence. The road to its return in the AI era took convincing Catz to invest in the cloud and the recruitment of key customers, such as Zoom, TikTok, FedEx, and Toyota, among others.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, a handful of transformative customers joined the company’s platform. Zoom Communications Inc., struggling to handle the spike in consumer demand, turned to Oracle Cloud to help handle traffic.
In 2023, the company secured close to two billion dollars from Uber Technologies Inc. However, the biggest customer of Oracle was ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, raking in a billion dollars for the company annually in revenue since the announcement of the deal in 2020.
Ellison and Oracle’s rise illustrates how quickly the title of the “world’s richest person” can change hands. More importantly, as cloud contracts grow, so do concerns about data privacy, the environmental impact of data centres, corporate power in AI, and who gets to control these emerging platforms.
Tags
AI, Elon Musk, Finance, stocks
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