The Oracle Guy Is Now The Second Richest Man On Earth

The tech world has long been enamoured with youth. But this summer, it’s an 80-year-old software executive—not a social media founder or rocket magnate—who’s climbed to the second spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, has surpassed both Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, his net worth touching $275.9 billion in July. Only Elon Musk stands ahead. The leap comes on the back of a staggering 32% rise in Oracle’s stock in June, fuelled by investor confidence in its cloud infrastructure and enterprise AI capabilities. Ellison, who still owns around 41% of the company he helped build nearly five decades ago, added more than $56 billion to his wealth in just over a month.

It is a remarkable second act—not just for a man, but for a company often dismissed as a legacy name in an industry obsessed with novelty. Oracle, founded in 1977, once dominated the database software market but had struggled to remain relevant in the cloud era. That perception is changing. In a tech economy increasingly driven by AI and back-end systems capable of sustaining it, Oracle’s offerings have become foundational. And Ellison—long dismissed as a relic—has found himself once again in the middle of a technological realignment.

This is not, however, a story of overnight success.

Larry Ellison Who?

Born in New York City to a single mother, raised by relatives in a working-class Chicago neighbourhood, and twice a college dropout, Ellison arrived at Silicon Valley not as a visionary but as a coder. Oracle’s origin story—a three-person startup, a borrowed idea from an IBM white paper, and a CIA contract codenamed “Oracle”—is well-trodden. But what’s often missed is what followed: Ellison spent the next four decades building an enterprise empire, largely out of the spotlight, away from the public glamour enjoyed by Gates, Jobs, or Zuckerberg.

He stepped down as CEO in 2014 but retained control as chairman and chief technology officer. Unlike many of his peers, Ellison never truly exited the company. In recent years, Oracle has moved aggressively into cloud computing, acquiring companies like NetSuite and Sun Microsystems along the way. The pivot was neither sudden nor particularly fashionable at the time—but it was strategic. And now, with enterprise AI emerging as the next gold rush, Oracle is positioned not at the edges of the conversation, but at its centre.

To be clear, Ellison’s rise is not simply the result of corporate foresight. It’s also structural. Nearly 80% of his wealth is tied to Oracle stock. As investors rush to buy into AI infrastructure, his fortune has followed. But the timing is notable. In an era that rewards velocity, Ellison’s story is one of duration—of a kind of stubborn longevity that rarely gets the same attention as disruption. 

Coming in hot

Here is the list of the top ten richest people in the world currently, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

#1 Elon Musk: $358B

#2 Larry Ellison: $251B

#3 Mark Zuckerberg: $251B

#4 Jeff Bezos: $247B

#5 Steve Ballmer: $174B

#6 Larry Page: $165B

#7 Bernard Arnault: $156B

#8 Sergey Brin: $154B

#9 Jensen Huang: $149B

#10 Warren Buffet: $141B

India’s richest? Mukesh Ambani sits at #16 with $108B, while Gautam Adani is at #20.