Larry Ellison Just Knocked Musk Off His Throne

Elon Musk has finally been dethroned.

For the first time in history, Larry Ellison—the 81-year-old Oracle cofounder with a samurai sword collection, a private Hawaiian island, and a taste for the long game—has become the richest man alive. His net worth surged to $393 billion this week, leapfrogging Musk’s $385 billion. It wasn’t a Tesla launch or a Mars colony that did it, but the decidedly unsexy world of enterprise software and cloud infrastructure.

In a single trading session, Oracle stock exploded by 41%, the biggest one-day jump in the company’s history. The reason? Wall Street finally believes that Oracle is no longer a dinosaur but the backbone of the AI arms race. OpenAI, Nvidia, and a handful of other AI giants signed multi-billion-dollar contracts for Oracle’s data centres. That sent Ellison’s fortune up by a staggering $101 billion in one day—the largest increase Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index has ever recorded. Musk, meanwhile, has watched Tesla’s stock limp along, down double digits this year.

Ellison’s Arc 

Ellison is not a man who thrives on speed, clearly. Over the past decade, Oracle ploughed $142 billion into stock buybacks, slashing the number of outstanding shares in half. Meanwhile, Ellison, who rarely sold, saw his stake climb to 41% without lifting a finger. The same shares Wall Street used to sneer at are now the crown jewel of the AI infrastructure boom. Unlike Musk’s flair for disruption, Ellison’s empire is built on continuity. And at 81, he’s still very much playing.

Meanwhile, Musk hasn’t lost his billions, but he’s lost momentum for sure. Tesla is grappling with political headwinds in Washington, waning consumer appetite for EVs, and a CEO who seems more interested in Twitter fights than car sales. The proposed $1 trillion Tesla pay package might one day make him the world’s first trillionaire, but right now, he’s watching an octogenarian database king lap him on the leaderboard.

While Musk represents speed, chaos, ambition, Ellison represents durability. If Musk is Silicon Valley’s rockstar CEO, Ellison is the casino owner who cashes the chips when the band packs up.

The Politics of Power

There’s another layer here. Ellison has tethered himself to the Trump White House. He’s part of Stargate, a $500 million project with OpenAI and SoftBank to build out AI infrastructure in the U.S. Oracle is circling TikTok, which faces a forced sale, and Ellison personally financed his son’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount. This isn’t just a bigger yacht and a bigger net worth. It’s tech, media, and politics converging in one man’s hands.

That matters. It shows what the next era of billionaire influence looks like. Not just building rockets or luxury EVs, but controlling the servers, the content, and the political pipelines through which the future runs.

While, Musk once embodied the zeitgeist—EVs, space travel, meme stocks, Ellison's rise is also signaling a bigger shift. Now the crown belongs to the infrastructure guy, the man providing the digital scaffolding for AI to actually work. At 81, Ellison is proof that in Silicon Valley, endurance often outperforms audacity.

The richest man in the world today isn’t the one promising to colonise Mars. It’s the one selling shovels in the AI gold rush. And that, more than the billions themselves, tells you where the future is tilting.