Larry Ellison, founder of the U.S. software corporations Oracle, famous for its databases management programs, is locked in a battle with Elon Musk for the title of the world's richest person. Ellison is a longtime friend of Musk and previously served on Tesla's board.
According to foreign media including the Washington Post (WP) on the 10th (local time), Oracle's share price surged more than 40% intraday, and the fortune of 81-year-old founder Larry Ellison reportedly swelled by over $100 billion (about 139 trillion won) in a single day. At 12 p.m. Eastern time that day, Oracle shares were up 41.36% from the previous day at $341.39, and Ellison briefly overtook Tesla Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Elon Musk to be recorded as the world's richest person.
However, as the market closed, the stock gave back part of its gains, and Ellison has currently ceded the top spot to Musk by about $1 billion (about 1.38 trillion won) in net worth. Still, he holds an overwhelming lead over No. 3 billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO, by $119 billion (about 165 trillion won).
Ellison is the largest shareholder, holding 41% equity in Oracle. According to CNN, most of Ellison's asset comes from his Oracle equity, and he is known to have held the shares unchanged for more than 25 years. The company released its quarterly earnings report the previous day, and when it said its "remaining performance obligation (RPO)" was $455 billion (about 631.9 trillion won), the stock shot up like a blowtorch. RPO refers to the portion of contracted revenue that has not yet been fulfilled.
It is also interpreted that investor sentiment caught fire after it noted that cloud-based revenue grew 77% to $18 billion on a fiscal year basis this time and would rise eightfold to $144 billion in four years.
Ellison began building his career in earnest in his early 20s as a programmer in Silicon Valley, California. His childhood was not smooth; he was born to a teenage single mother, and at 9 months old, he suffered from pneumonia and was entrusted to relatives. His relatives, a devout Jewish family, sent him for adoption, and Ellison thus moved his base from New York to Chicago.
Ellison later attended the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago but is known not to have finished his studies. Instead, he taught himself programming and built his track record, and with the launch of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s databases program as a catalyst, he founded a software development lab, which later grew into the corporations Oracle. Today, Oracle is the fourth-largest cloud provider in the United States after Amazon, Microsoft (MS), and Google.
Ellison served as Oracle CEO from 1977 to 2014 and is credited with growing the company into a global corporations. In particular, in the early 1990s when Oracle faced a crisis due to deteriorating profitability and accounting fraud, Ellison led the company's reconstruction through swift restructuring and securing technological strength in the cloud institutional sector. Although he has stepped down as CEO, he concurrently serves as board chair and chief technology officer (CTO), overseeing overall company operations.
Ellison is also known as an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, he personally hosted a fundraiser for Trump and reportedly took part in strategy meetings challenging the results after Trump's defeat. After Trump's second-term inauguration, he jointly announced at the White House, along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank Chairman Son Jeong-ui, the mega artificial intelligence (AI) project "Stargate," which will invest $500 billion over four years.