Oracle's Larry Ellison becomes richer than Zuckerberg and Arnault with a net worth of $203.9 billion

Oracle co-founder Ellison climbs to the third richest spot, driven by Oracle's AI and cloud growth.

Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, has officially become the third richest person in the world with a net worth of $203.9 billion, according to Forbes. 

On Tuesday, Ellison briefly surpassed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos before settling back into third place behind Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk. 

This latest leap in wealth positions Ellison ahead of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault.

Ellison’s net worth increased by $22.9 billion on Tuesday, boosted by a surge in Oracle’s stock, which has risen 22.5% this month following strong earnings and an upward revision of its annual outlook. 

Oracle’s success is largely attributed to its cloud applications and artificial intelligence initiatives. “We are literally building the smallest, most portable, most affordable cloud data centers all the way up to 200-megawatt data centers, ideal for training very large language models and keeping them up to date,” Ellison said during Oracle's earnings call last week.

Ellison owns nearly 40% of Oracle, a company he founded in 1977, as well as about 15 million shares of Tesla. 

His climb up the billionaire rankings has been swift this year, overtaking Google’s Larry Page, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer. 

Ellison's fortune also benefited from Oracle’s growing partnerships with tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in the cloud computing space.