Billionaire Larry Ellison's fortune beats Bill Gates for the first time as Oracle gets a boost from the AI craze
- Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison's fortune just surged past that of Bill Gates for the first time, to a staggering $130 billion.
- The jump in wealth comes as Oracle gets a boost from investor hype around artificial intelligence.
Billionaire Larry Ellison's wealth just surged to new heights, beating Bill Gates for the first time ever.
According to Bloomberg, the Oracle co-founder has grabbed the No. 4 spot on a list of the world's wealthiest, also surpassing fellow business tycoons including Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg.
Ellison's net worth jumped by almost $6 billion on Monday to $130 billion, while Microsoft co-founder Gates currently has $129 billion.
The surge in Ellison's fortune comes as his software company's shares get a boost from hype around artificial intelligence stocks, following the smashing debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
So far this year, Oracle's stock has rallied 40% along with other tech names best exposed to the AI revolution, including Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia. The company also announced quarterly earnings on Monday, with total quarterly revenues rising 17%.
"Oracle's Gen2 Cloud has quickly become the number 1 choice for running Generative AI workloads," Ellison said.
"Why? Because Oracle has the highest performance, lowest cost GPU cluster technology in the world. NVIDIA themselves are using our clusters, including one with more than 4,000 GPUs, for their AI infrastructure," he added.
The AI craze has also fueled a much talked-about rally in tech stocks this year, which has helped lift the Nasdaq 100 by about 36% so far in 2023.
Other leaders in the tech industry have also seen their wealth balloon, like Ellison, thanks to the AI frenzy. That includes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang who holds a net-worth of $35.4 billion, per Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.