Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who once mocked cloud computing as “complete gibberish,” is now the second-richest person on Earth, overtaking Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. With a net worth of $288 billion, he is behind Elon Musk who has a net worth of $3379 billion, as per Bloomberg Billioniare Index. The reason: Oracle’s soaring success in cloud services, a business Ellison once ridiculed but that has since transformed the company and his fortune. In 2008, Ellison dismissed cloud computing as “complete gibberish.” But today, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure is fueling record growth thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) which has increased the demand for computing power and storage. Oracle has emerged as a key supplier for big companies like OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI.In June this year, Larry Ellison’s wealth jumped by more than $20 billion after Oracle’s stock surged 13% to $199.85 — its biggest one-day gain in a year. According to a Bloomberg report then, the rally came after the company forecast a 70% increase in cloud infrastructure sales for the current fiscal year.

Oracle’s bet on AI

Long known for its databases, Oracle struggled for years to find its place in cloud computing. But under CEO Safra Catz, the company has made massive bets on AI-driven cloud services. Oracle recently launched Stargate, a joint venture with OpenAI to provide unprecedented computing power.“Oracle is on its way to becoming one of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure companies,” Catz said in a statement. She added that revenue growth in 2026 will be “dramatically higher.”Ellison told analysts about a historic order: “We recently got an order that said we’ll take all the capacity you have, wherever it is… we never got an order like that before.”To meet such demand, Oracle’s capital expenditure has soared. The company spent $21.2 billion in the last year and plans to raise that to $25 billion this year. Much of this will go into building mega data centers to support AI workloads.“The reason demand continues to outstrip supply is we can only build these data centers, build these computers, so fast,” Ellison explained.