SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 16: Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison delivers the keynote speech during Oracle OpenWorld 2019 on September 16, 2019 in San Francisco, California. Board Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison kicked off Oracle OpenWorld 2019 with a keynote. The annual conference runs until September 19.
Justin Sullivan | beautiful pictures
Oracle Chairperson Larry Ellison nearly $16 billion richer at the end of Friday, passing Googleco-founders and directed him towards Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Oracle’s Stocks rallied 16% after reporting better-than-expected quarterly earnings late Thursday. Ellison, the company’s largest shareholder with 1.14 billion shares, is now worth $135.7 billion, according to Forbes.
The Oracle rally, the second largest rally in 20 years, was a huge boon for Ellison, who co-founded the software company in 1977. On Forbes list of billionaires, he was ahead of Google Larry’s page ($126.3 billion) and Sergey Brin ($121.7 billion) in fifth place. Gates, the world’s fourth-richest person, is worth $139.2 billion.
Ellison’s resurgence is somewhat of a surprise considering next-generation tech companies, like Google, Amazon and Facebook, has grown a lot faster in recent years while Oracle has stalled with mostly single-digit growth. But Oracle is showing signs of accelerating, and the company’s latest guidance has topped estimates, giving investors high confidence that the move to the cloud is working.
A rebound in his personal fortune relative to that of the Google founders could be a particularly sweet achievement for Ellison. In April, Supreme Court sided with Google against Oracle in a long-running copyright dispute over software used in the Android mobile operating system. The case involves software code that Google used to build Android and is considered a landmark dispute over what kind of computer code is protected under US copyright law.
Additionally, Oracle is catching up with cloud infrastructure, and Google is one of the market share leaders. In 2018, Google’s cloud boss Thomas Kurian joined the internet company from Oracle, where he spent more than two decades, rising to become president of product development.
Ellison, 77, derives most of his fortune from his ownership of Oracle, which has appreciated in value by about $44 billion this year, thanks to a 59 percent increase in the company’s stock price. But he made some extra money from betting on Elon Musk three years ago.
Ellison disclosure At the end of 2018, he bought a $1 billion stake in Tesla. Over the past three years, the market capitalization of electric carmakers has grown by nearly 1,300%, and Ellison’s stock is now worth $16 billion. Even after the recent price drop, Tesla is up 44% this year.
