Oracle chairman and co-founder Larry Ellison, the father of Paramount Global’s new owner David Ellison and a major investor in the media company after its merger with Skydance, just saw his wealth soar by over $100 billion.
The company reported stellar earnings late Tuesday with a massive backlog of contracts for its Cloud business that seeming to ensure its pole position in the AI market and pushed the shares up by more than 40%. That added over $300 billion in market value to the company where Ellison holds a 41% interest and resulted in his becoming the world’s richest person for the first time, worth $393 million and passing Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It was the biggest one-day increase ever recorded by the index, Bloomberg said. It has Tesla founder Musk’s wealth at $385 billion.
Musk became the world’s richest person in 2021 before losing the title to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. He reclaimed it in 2024 and had held it for just over 300 days until today, according to the index.
The holdings of all are largely in stock and wealth stats numbers can fluctuate from hour to hour with share prices. There are also dueling indexes. Bellwether Forbes still had Musk in the lead at $437 billion.
Oracle shares are up 35% at about $325, off a high today of $346.
The Ellison family with RedBird Capital acquired Paramount in an $8.4 billion deal that closed in August. David Ellison has said he and his father are close and speak daily and that the Oracle connection could certainly be tapped to bring more of a tech focus to Paramount Global, which now has some very deep pockets behind it. Ellison, who is close to President Donald Trump, has been floated as suitor for TikTok if it sells its U.S. operations.
The Forbes real-time billionaires list has, from nos. 3 to 10, Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Steve Ballmer, Arnault and Warren Buffett.
