Elon Musk just got bumped from the top spot on the billionaire leaderboard, and the man who pulled it off isn’t some flashy tech upstart or crypto bro. It’s Larry Ellison…the 79-year-old Oracle founder who’s been quietly stacking wealth while everyone else was too busy watching Musk tweet memes and launch rockets.
According to Bloomberg, Ellison’s net worth shot up by an eye-watering $101 billion in a single day, putting him at $393 billion and knocking Musk, who sits at $385 billion, into second place. The cause of this financial explosion? Oracle’s stock went vertical after a blockbuster earnings report that sent Wall Street scrambling to keep up.
Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz, dropped the bombshell after the markets closed Tuesday. The company has become a critical player in the AI infrastructure race and just locked down four multibillion-dollar contracts. Apparently, the demand for Oracle’s cloud services and data centers is through the roof, with more deals expected soon. The company’s stock jumped 40 percent the next morning, which is nearly unheard of for a company already worth nearly $700 billion.
This historic one-day leap made Ellison the wealthiest man on the planet — at least for now. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index called it the biggest single-day wealth increase ever recorded. Not bad for a guy who’s been quietly investing in AI infrastructure while other billionaires were busy chasing headlines.
But don’t count Elon Musk out just yet. While he may have taken a back seat in the billionaire race for now, he’s still very much in the game — and possibly heading toward trillionaire territory. A new compensation plan proposed by Tesla’s board would reward Musk with nearly 424 million shares if he can take Tesla’s market cap from $1.1 trillion to a staggering $8.5 trillion over the next decade.
That’s a moonshot goal, no doubt. But if Musk pulls it off, his net worth could skyrocket by another $900 billion, making him the richest human in history and the first person to break the trillion-dollar barrier. The plan ties his payout to huge milestones like mass production of robotaxis and humanoid robots.
The vote is set for November. Until then, Larry Ellison wears the crown. But in the world of tech titans, fortunes change fast.
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