Oracle’s Larry Ellison beats Zuckerberg, Arnault to become world’s third-richest person

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison became the third richest person in the world on Tuesday with a net worth of $203.9 billion, according to Forbes, surpassing Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault.

Earlier on Tuesday, Ellison briefly beat out Amazon’s Jeff Bezos before dipping back down to third. 

Bezos has a net worth of $206.4 billion, according to Forbes. He has held second position on and off since 2016.

Ellison started the year as the eighth richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

His net worth has skyrocketed more than 125% in just over two years, from about $80 billion in mid-October 2022 to $181 billion at Monday’s close, according to Business Insider.

His net worth increased by $22.9 billion Tuesday from $181 billion at Monday’s close, according to Forbes. 

The 80-year-old billionaire owns nearly 40% of Oracle, a software company he founded in 1977 and led as CEO for nearly 40 years.

He also owns about 15 million shares of Tesla, according to Forbes, which he bought prior to joining the company’s board in 2018. He held onto the shares after stepping down from the board in 2022.

So far this year, Ellison has gained enough wealth to overtake Google’s Larry Page, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and now LVMH’s Arnault and Meta’s Zuckerberg.

The only billionaires ahead of Ellison are Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk, the richest person in the world with a net worth of $255 billion, according to Forbes.

Oracle shares have grown 7.9% over the past five days after the company last week raised its annual outlook and reported earnings that beat expectations.

The stock is up a whopping 22.5% this month.

Oracle has found success through its cloud applications and by jumping on the artificial intelligence train.

During the company’s earnings call last week, Ellison said Oracle is building data centers to accommodate the increasing demand for AI.

“We are literally building the smallest, most portable, most affordable cloud data centers all the way up to 200-megawatt data centers, ideal for training very large language models and keeping them up to date,” Ellison said on the call.

Oracle announced last week it was partnering with Amazon’s cloud computing unit, after revealing similar partnerships with Microsoft and Google.