Who is Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, who briefly overtook Tesla's Elon Musk to become the world's richest person?

Oracle founder Larry Ellison briefly overtook Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday, to become the world’s richest person. This came in the wake of Oracle’s massive cloud growth forecast that had sent its shares soaring nearly as much as 40% in the U.S. exchanges on Wednesday.

The 81-year-old tech billionaire saw a whopping $101 billion addition to his market wealth in a single day, lifting his net worth to $393 billion, higher than Musk’s $384 billion. This was reportedly the largest one-day gain ever recorded.

Musk’s wealth has been on the decline due to the consistently underperforming Tesla shares.

Oracle surprised Wall Street with projections that its cloud infrastructure revenue would climb from $10 billion last fiscal year to $144 billion by 2030. The company also disclosed $455 billion in contracted but unrecognised revenue, underscoring its expanding role in the AI boom. Major deals with OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia and AMD have further cemented Oracle’s place in the race for AI infrastructure.

By market close, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk edged back ahead, with Ellison’s wealth settling at $383 billion versus Musk’s $384 billion. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg ranked third at $264 billion, followed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos at $252 billion, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at $210 billion and $196 billion, respectively.

Ellison currently serves as company chairman and as its chief technology officer. Her reportedly owns over 1.16 billion shares.

Oracle’s market value has now touched the $922 billion mark.

The milestone, however, came alongside a controversial move that of the company recently laying off about 10% of its India workforce in abrupt video calls.