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The artificial intelligence boom has sent Oracle (ORCL+0.93%) co-founder Larry Ellison’s net worth past that of Jeff Bezos, making him the new second-richest person in the world.
The Oracle chairman’s real-time net worth soared to $206.1 billion on Monday, according to Forbes. Bezos is close behind at $203.1 billion. Meanwhile, Oracle’s shares were up almost 5% during mid-day trading on Monday. The software giant’s shares have climbed around 63.4% so far this year due to its cloud businesses. Ellison owns just under 40% of Oracle’s outstanding stock, according to Forbes. The billionaire is ranked as the fifth-richest person in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
After Oracle beat Wall Street’s expectations with its first-quarter earnings results last week, the software company saw its shares jump 13% the day after, before closing at a record $157.10 on September 11. The company’s total quarterly revenues in USD were up 7% from the previous year, while revenues were up 8% in constant currency, it said. In its cloud services division, Oracle’s revenues in USD were up 12% year-over-year, while it was up 22% in constant currency.
“As Cloud Services became Oracle’s largest business, both our operating income and earnings per share growth accelerated,” Oracle chief executive, Safra Catz, said in a statement.
Ellison said the company has 162 cloud data centers, either in operation or under construction, around the world. The largest “is 800 megawatts and will contain acres of NVIDIA (NVDA+3.10%) GPU Clusters for training large scale AI models,” Ellison said.
At an Oracle investor event last Thursday, Ellison said he and Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, were “begging” Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang for more GPUs, or graphics processing units, which power some of the world’s most advanced large language models.
“Please take our money. No, no take more of it. We need you to take more of our money. Please,” Ellison said, Barrons reported. “It went okay. It worked.”