Oracle founder and largest shareholder Larry Ellison rose two spots on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index after the tech giant issued an upbeat outlook this week.
Just yesterday Ellison's net worth was $138 billion, but overnight it increased by $14 billion to $152 billion.
That's mainly because the 79-year-old entrepreneur owns more than 40% of the cloud applications business. The company's shares surged 13% on June 11 after it reported strong year-end earnings.
Ellison's surge in wealth has seen him overtake two other tech tycoons on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index: former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Sergey Brin, founder of Google parent Alphabet.
While Ballmer and Brin have seen their fortunes grow so far this year ($21.2 billion and $27.2 billion, respectively), it's not enough to overtake Ellison, whose wealth is set to grow by $29.1 billion in 2024 alone, a new record.
The reason their total assets are growing exponentially is because of a favorite word in Silicon Valley: artificial intelligence.
Looking first at Oracle, in the company's big outlook released on Tuesday, CEO Safra Catz said the company “closed the largest sales deal in our history, fueled by massive demand for training AI large-scale language models.”
Catz, who previously served as Oracle's CFO, continued: “Through fiscal 2025, we expect demand for AI to remain strong, driving further revenue growth for Oracle.”
“In the fourth quarter alone, Oracle signed more than 30 AI sales agreements totaling more than $12.5 billion, including a deal with OpenAI to train ChatGPT on Oracle Cloud.”
In addition to its deal with OpenAI, Oracle is also working more closely with Microsoft and Google, backers of ChatGPT makers. “As customers continue to choose and use multiple clouds, hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google are responding by interconnecting their clouds,” Ellison said in the earnings call.
“Oracle recently signed a cloud interconnection agreement with Google, and Oracle databases will be available in Google Cloud in September of this year.”
Ellison isn't the only one
People with ties to big tech companies have also seen their wealth soar this year, thanks to, you guessed it, AI: The ultra-rich have seen their wealth increase by at least $150 billion thanks to the technology.
Take Brin, who owns 41.8% of Alphabet's Class B shares, according to its 2023 proxy statement, and CEO Sundar Pichai, who owns 227,560 Class A shares. Both have seen their fortunes grow thanks to disruptive technology, and Pichai is now approaching billionaire status thanks to his pay package and stock-based compensation.
Alphabet's shares have soared this year, up 28% year to date as of this writing, especially when earnings share positive AI-related news. As an example, on April 25, the company released its Q1 2024 results, stating that the “Gemini era is well underway” as it continues to establish itself as an AI leader.
The market responded favorably to the announcement, with stock prices opening the day after the announcement 15% higher than the previous morning.
The same can be said for Ballmer and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. In April, Gates' fortune increased by $2 billion thanks to an earnings call that mentioned AI 50 times, as CEO Satya Nadella announced a series of new AI initiatives. “We have the most powerful AI infrastructure, used by our partners OpenAI, Nvidia, and leading AI startups like Adept and Inflection to train their large-scale models,” he said.
After the conference call, Microsoft shares recorded their largest one-day percentage gain since November 2022. Analysts also noted that the stock hit a milestone in absolute value: It had never previously risen by more than $19.77 in a single transaction, which was at the end of April.
Meanwhile, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's wealth has increased due to his “year of efficiency” and his work on artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg outlined a series of measures to make the company more efficient in January and a broader artificial intelligence strategy in February. Since then, his wealth has grown from $63 billion to $181 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
