Larry Ellison is still not the world's richest person

Oracle’s 80-year-old co-founder pulls off a $25 billion cloud day to leapfrog Zuck and Bezos into the No. 2 spot

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has reclaimed the No. 2 spot on Forbes's real-time billionaire list, trailing only Elon Musk after leapfrogging Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

Thanks to better-than-expected results from Oracle's fiscal fourth quarter ended in May 31, shares jumped 14%, and Ellison's net worth surged roughly $25 billion to $242 billion by midday Thursday, marking the largest single-day gain on Forbes's real-time billionaire list.

On the June 12 earnings call, he told investors demand for cloud was "astronomical" and "insatiable," even quoting one customer: "We'll take all the capacity you have, wherever it is."

Oracle’s share of the cloud market stands at around 3 percent, well behind AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and China’s Alibaba.

Ellison co-founded Oracle, initially called Software Development Laboratories (SDL), nearly 50 years ago. Its initial product was a relational database based on the then-new relational model, pioneered by IBM’s Edgar Codd. IBM already had a successful database at the time — the hierarchical IMS — affording Oracle the opportunity to exploit the market for relational databases, which still dominate today. Oracle built an enterprise application portfolio largely by acquisition, most notably the protracted, hostile 2005 takeover of PeopleSoft in 2005, after the HR and finance software outfit had acquired JD Edwards in 2003.

Toward the tail end of the dot-com boom, Ellison often appeared in the number two spot, but briefly topped usual winner Bill Gates for a brief period in 2000, according to the New York Post. Fast-forward to midday Thursday, and Ellison's fortune hit $242 billion—just enough to nudge out Meta's Mark Zuckerberg (40 years younger, $239 billion) and Amazon's Jeff Bezos (20 years younger, $228 billion) on Forbes's real-time rich list. Gates is at number 12.

All are well behind Musk, the electric car, space rocket, and social media magnate, whose net worth is around $406 billion. The friend of Ellison - and one-time friend of President Donald Trump - is one of the few people in the world who can be sanguine about losing $1 billion, or 0.3 percent of his wealth.

Beyond today's AI buzz, it might surprise some that the world's No. 2 billionaire is an 80-year-old whose tech empire began in the mid-'70s.

And there is no sign of Ellison retiring any time soon. But if he does, at least he owns a Hawaiian island on which he can live out the rest of his days. ®