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Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison is $18 billion richer after the software maker he founded in 1977 forecast double-digit revenue growth for the fiscal year, putting the stock on pace for its sharpest rally since 2021.
Ellison owns about 1.15 billion Oracle shares, equal to around 42% of the company’s outstanding stock. With Wednesday’s increase, he now has a net worth of around $170 billion, according to Forbes, making him the fifth-richest person in the world and just behind Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
While Ellison has been out of the CEO role for a decade — he took up the title of chief technology officer in 2014 — he remains the leading figure at the company and still participates in quarterly earnings calls. On Tuesday’s call, following the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report, Ellison boasted about Oracle’s construction of data centers that can accommodate the increasing demand for generative artificial intelligence.
“We are literally building the smallest, most portable, most affordable cloud data centers all the way up to 200-megawatt data centers, ideal for training very large language models and keeping them up-to-date,” Ellison said.
Oracle shares soared 13% as of Wednesday afternoon to a record $139.82 and were on pace for their best day since Dec. 10, 2021. Analysts at Bank of America, Barclays, Bernstein, JPMorgan and UBS raised their 12-month price targets on the stock.
Though quarterly profit and revenue fell short of Wall Street estimates, Oracle said it expects double-digit revenue growth in the new fiscal year, compared with an increase of 6% in the year that ended on May 31. Oracle said its database will become available on Google’s public cloud and that OpenAI will be able to use Microsoft’s cloud-based AI tools atop Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.
Ellison’s Oracle stake stands to increase. Later this year and next year, stock options granted to him in 2014 and 2017, when the stock price was considerably lower, will expire.
Ellison is known for lavish spending. He owned properties in California, Florida and the Hawaiian island of Lanai as of 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported. He has donated to political campaigns for decades, funded a sailing league, and is the owner of the Indian Wells Tennis Garden in California.
A close friend of Elon Musk, Ellison joined and then left the board of Tesla. He was reportedly planning to help finance Skydance Media’s proposed merger with Paramount Global. His son, David Ellison, is Skydance Media’s founder and CEO.
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