Larry Ellison also owns a sprawling real estate empire, nearly half of media giant Paramount and a sizable stake in Tesla.
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Oracle cofounder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison just got nearly $100 billion richer in a single day. It’s the biggest single-day gain ever, and it’s all thanks to Ellison’s 41% stake in Oracle. He was worth $293 billion at yesterday’s market close; as of noon on Wednesday, Ellison is worth $400.9 billion—making him the second-ever person to cross the $400 billion mark. (Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, did so in December and is now worth an estimated $437.4 billion.)
Despite reporting first quarter revenue and earnings that missed analysts’ expectations after the market closed Tuesday, Oracle’s shares soared by 38% Wednesday morning on the company’s projection that revenue from cloud infrastructure–mostly to power AI–will skyrocket from $18 billion this year to $144 billion over the next four years. That segment of Oracle’s business competes with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google, as well as eight-year-old CoreWeave, and includes the President Trump-endorsed Stargate project, a $500 million AI infrastructure effort led by Oracle, OpenAI and Softbank that features a massive data center in Abilene, Texas. (Ellison’s good relationship with Trump couldn’t have hurt, either.) Notably: much of Oracle’s revenue growth this quarter comes from the very competitors who use it for AI, so it’s hard to know who’s an organic customer here to stay versus a customer trying to offload data center capacity onto Oracle.
“We will build and operate more cloud infrastructure data than all of our cloud infrastructure competitors combined,” Ellison, 81, said on Tuesday’s earnings call. “Oracle runs everywhere.”
Ellison hasn’t always been able to capture so much of Oracle’s gains—but he can now, because of stock buybacks. Fifteen years ago, Ellison had a 22% stake in the company, which he cofounded and ran as CEO from 1977 to 2014 before transitioning into the role of chief technology officer. Since 2011, Oracle has spent $142 billion on stock buybacks, sometimes taking out controversial loans to finance the share repurchases. The actions reduced the company’s share count by about half and nearly doubled Ellison’s stake in the company to 41%—because Ellison held onto his shares over the years, rarely selling.
That doesn’t mean he can’t spend freely, though, thanks to handsome dividends that have grown since Oracle paid its first one in 2009 to a current level of $500 million per quarter for Ellison. Another factor are the Oracle shares he has pledged to secure loans, which allow Ellison to borrow against his stock without selling. Ellison is the only Oracle executive permitted to pledge shares, and has pledged 277 million of them (worth around $93 billion as of 10:30 a.m).
Oracle’s share buybacks have slowed in recent years. Part of it might be because Oracle is running out of cash and using its borrowing power elsewhere. Oracle forecast three years of negative free cash flow on its earnings call—largely because they’re spending and borrowing big to build out AI data centers—and reported $92 billion in outstanding debt at the end of May. The company also reportedly laid off around 3,000 employees this month. Still, billionaire Oracle CEO Safra Catz on Tuesday’s earnings call reaffirmed Oracle’s commitment to “stock repurchases, prudent use of debt and a dividend.” That includes a more modest $150 million stock buyback and $4.7 billion in dividends over the last year. Around $2 billion of that dividend went to Ellison.
Iain Martin contributed reporting.