New York (CNN) – Elon Musk briefly lost his title of “world’s richest person” to Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.
Ellison’s wealth jumped by $89 billion to $383.2 billion on Wednesday after Oracle’s stunningly strong earnings report Tuesday evening, according to Bloomberg.
Oracle (ORCL) reported surging demand for it’s data center capacity from AI customers, launching the stock into the stratosphere. Shares gained as much as 43% before closing higher by about 36% on Wednesday; it was the stock’s biggest single-day gain as 1992.
ellison is Oracle’s largest individual shareholder. His gains in net worth made him the world’s richest person for a few hours on Wednesday, briefly surpassing Musk’s net worth.
But as of market close on Wednesday, Musk’s net worth was $384.2 billion, beating out Ellison’s by $1 billion.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz announced Tuesday after the stock market closed that the company signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with customers during the quarter, and she expects to sign several more in the coming months.
That electric forecast was powered by Oracle’s emergence as a key provider of infrastructure that powers AI companies’ enormous demands for computing power – Oracle’s bread and butter as a cloud services and database software provider. In July, Oracle announced a deal to provide ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI with 4.5 gigawatts of electricity to power its AI software.
“We’ll be talking about this one for a long time,” said ben Reitzes, analyst at Melius Research, about Oracle’s earnings report in a note to investors Wednesday. Reitzes called Oracle’s $455 billion backlog in demand for its AI services “staggering.”
Ellison briefly captured the title of world’s richest person becuase of the stock’s unusual gains. The stock’s jump is exceedingly rare for a company that has a massive market value.
oracle shares hit a record high on Wednesday. Oracle’s market value gained roughly $244 billion, lifting it to roughly $922 billion. oracle on Wednesday jumped from being the 13th-most valuable company in the S&P 500 to the 10th most-valuable,surpassing the market value of eli Lilly (LLY),Walmart (WMT) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM).