Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison became the world’s third richest person on Tuesday, with a net worth of $203.9 billion, surpassing Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault, according to Forbes.
Earlier on Tuesday, Ellison momentarily outperformed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos before falling back to third.
According to Forbes, Bezos’ net worth is $206.4 billion. He has held second place on and off since 2016.
Ellison began the year as the eighth wealthiest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
His net worth has increased by more than 125% in just over two years, from approximately $80 billion in mid-October 2022 to $181 billion at Monday’s closing, according to Business Insider.
According to Forbes, his net worth grew by $22.9 billion on Tuesday, up from $181 billion at Monday’s end.
The 80-year-old millionaire owns over 40% of Oracle, the software business he started in 1977 and headed as CEO for nearly four decades.
According to Forbes, he holds over 15 million Tesla shares, which he purchased before to joining the company’s board in 2018. He kept the shares after stepping away from the board in 2022.
So far this year, Ellison has accumulated enough money to surpass Google’s Larry Page, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, and now LVMH’s Arnault and Meta’s Zuckerberg.
The only billionaires ahead of Ellison are Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person with a net worth of $255 billion, according to Forbes.
Oracle stock has risen 7.9% in the previous five days, after the firm boosted its annual guidance and produced earnings that exceeded expectations.
This month, the stock is up a staggering 22.5%.
Oracle has found success with its cloud applications and by getting on board the artificial intelligence train.
During the company’s earnings call last week, Ellison stated that Oracle is expanding data centers to meet the growing demand for AI.
“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 stated during the telephone interview.
Oracle said this week that it was partnering with Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, following similar announcements with Microsoft and Google.