According to Forbes,OracleCompany co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison has surpassed Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to become the second-richest person in the world. On Thursday, Ellison's net worth surged $26 billion to $243 billion, the largest single-day increase among billionaires.
The surge puts Ellison second on Forbes' richest list, surpassing Amazon Chairman Bezos (net worth $227 billion) and Meta CEO Zuckerberg (net worth $239 billion), behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Oracle released a strong earnings report on Wednesday, pushing its stock price up more than 13% to $199.86 on Thursday. The financial report showed that the company's profit and sales for the quarter ended in May were stronger than expected.
Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick called the earnings update a "watershed" moment for Oracle, highlighting the importance of Ellison's vision in ushering in a new era of cloud computing, especially as Oracle plays a key role in the advancement of artificial intelligence technology.
TD Cowen analyst Derek Wood predicts Oracle's fiscal 2026, which begins this month, will be a "major inflection point" for the company's core cloud infrastructure services, driven by surging demand for artificial intelligence training workloads.