Oracle’s Late AI Bet Sends Shares Soaring, Ellison Overtakes Musk as World’s Richest Man
Oracle's AI gamble pays off—big time. Shares skyrocket as the tech giant finally catches the AI wave everyone saw coming three years ago.
The Larry Ellison Wealth Surge
Oracle's co-founder just leapfrogged Elon Musk for the world's richest title. Because nothing says 'visionary leadership' like being fashionably late to the biggest tech revolution since the internet.
Wall Street's Sudden Amnesia
Analysts who dismissed Oracle as legacy infrastructure suddenly can't upgrade their price targets fast enough. Turns out buying AI startups beats actually innovating—who knew?
Tech's New Old Money
While startups burn cash chasing benchmarks, Oracle just monetized its enterprise foothold. Because in tech, it's not about being first—it's about being last with the deepest pockets.
Another reminder that in finance, 'late to the party' just means you arrived after the cleanup crew but before the bill came.
AI is not just a buzzword—it’s infrastructure
Oracle’s AI attractiveness comes from its strategic alliances and neutral positioning in the AI arms race. It’s part of Stargate, a massive infrastructure initiative with OpenAI and SoftBank, giving Oracle preferred status as a compute-provider-of-choice.
Crucially, Oracle claims to offer AI inferencing capabilities, running models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok directly within its database stack, a convenience hyperscalers have yet to match. That unique positioning—neutral, integrated, and AI-enabled—has turned once-lagging Oracle into a major contender in AI infrastructure.
The ripple effect
In one of those rare moments where investor glee merges with spectacle, Larry Ellison vaulted past Elon Musk to become the world’s richest person, thanks to the stock surge. His net worth swelled by around $100 billion to roughly $393–400 billion.
Not everyone’s as ecstatic as Mrs. Ellison: Analysts caution the aggressive capex—Oracle expects to spend $35 billion to build data-center and supply AI chips—could dent free-cash-flow in the NEAR term and pressure margins.
AI was the marquee act, but Oracle also highlighted four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers in its latest quarter. That helped lift first-quarter revenue by 12% to $14.93 billion, including a 28% jump in cloud revenue to $7.2 billion.
Analysts at Piper Sandler and Bank of America weren’t shy either, raising price targets and upgrading the stock—noting the AI-driven backlog as “too strong to be summed up simply as a blow-out.”
The bottom line
Oracle’s AI pivot has become an investor tidal wave, backed by real contracts, locked-in backlog, and infrastructure ambitions that others can’t match—at least right now.
Whether the swell leads to a sea change or tidal recession depends on execution. But for now, Oracle has Wall Street enthralled, and its AI story is delivering more than just talking points—it’s delivering stock market fireworks. And if that's not a mixed metaphor, then nothing is.
