Oracle's Larry Ellison Just Passed Musk and Bezos to Become World's Richest Person

Larry Ellison just passed Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to become the world's richest person, and everyone's acting shocked, which is ridiculous. While Musk and Bezos were building rockets and arguing with unions, the 80-year-old Oracle founder was quietly positioning his boring database company as the backbone of the AI boom. Forbes now has him at the top with over $200 billion.

Here's the thing everyone missed: AI companies need databases. Shocking, right? While everyone was chasing the shiny new ChatGPT stuff, Oracle was sitting on 40+ years of enterprise database expertise. When OpenAI signed that $300 billion deal with Oracle, it wasn't because Oracle had the coolest AI models. It's because they're one of the few companies that can actually handle petabyte-scale data processing without shitting the bed, and AI training requires massive datasets. Oracle's AI infrastructure offerings are suddenly essential, and their OCI Supercluster technology is outpacing competitors in the AI compute market.

Oracle's stock is up nearly 50% this year, but here's what nobody's talking about: this might actually stick, unlike previous wealth rankings that change with Tesla's daily mood swings. Oracle's database business is boring as hell, but boring businesses tend to print money longer than flashy ones. When the AI bubble pops (and it will), companies will still need enterprise data management. They might not need another chatbot.

Ellison's timing here is either genius or pure luck. He bet big on Tesla back when everyone thought electric cars were a joke for hippies. Now he's inadvertently positioned Oracle as the plumbing for an entire industry that burns through hundreds of billions in investment. The guy who built database software in the 1980s is suddenly essential infrastructure for 2025's hottest tech.

The real question isn't whether Ellison deserves the wealth crown—it's whether Oracle can maintain this position when AI companies realize they're spending $115 billion to maybe break even. Oracle's recent quarterly results showed some insane AI-driven growth - their backlog shot up to something crazy like $400 billion, which I think was 3x growth or some similarly ridiculous number. Analysts keep calling them market leaders now, which is weird for a database company everyone thought was dying. But for now, the database king is laughing all the way to his Hawaiian island.

Let's talk about what everyone's dancing around: Larry Ellison is a notorious egomaniac who happens to be right about everything. The guy didn't just stumble into being the world's richest person—he's been predicting and positioning for tech trends while everyone else was still figuring out what a database was.

Back in 1977, when personal computers were toys and most businesses kept records on paper, Ellison looked at IBM's research papers on relational databases and thought "I can build this database thing better." Oracle wasn't some Stanford dorm room startup—it was three guys who reverse-engineered IBM's System R concept and beat IBM to market with their SQL-based database system. Classic Silicon Valley move: steal the idea, execute it better, and get there first.

What makes Ellison different from other tech billionaires is his complete lack of pretense about being anything other than ruthlessly competitive. While other CEOs tweet about "changing the world," Ellison has always been upfront about wanting to crush competitors. Oracle's aggressive licensing practices have pissed off enterprises for decades, but nobody can switch because Oracle owns their data infrastructure. Oracle licensing experts constantly warn about the hidden costs and compliance risks, while database modernization efforts often fail due to migration complexity and vendor lock-in. That's not vision—that's vendor lock-in executed at global scale.

The Hawaiian island stuff isn't just rich guy toys either. Ellison bought 98% of Lanai for $300 million and turned it into his personal tech experiment. He's testing sustainable energy, water systems, and agricultural tech on an actual island. When most billionaires buy islands to hide from taxes, Ellison bought one to play SimCity in real life.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about Ellison's wealth surge: it might actually last. Unlike Tesla stock or crypto, Oracle's database business has 40+ years of enterprise customers who literally can't leave without rebuilding their entire IT infrastructure. Oracle commands 28% of the database market share and maintains its dominance in the DB-Engines ranking, while enterprise migration costs remain prohibitively expensive for most organizations. AI companies can burn through billions, but they still need somewhere to store the data. Boring infrastructure beats flashy features every time when the bills come due.

Ellison's been saying for years that cloud computing would dominate, that AI would need massive databases, and that companies would pay insane amounts for reliable infrastructure. Wall Street called him a dinosaur while Amazon built AWS. Oracle's fiscal 2025 results showed $57.4 billion in revenue, and they were recognized as a leader in IDC's cloud infrastructure assessment. Now Oracle stock is up 47% this year because everyone finally realized the dinosaur was right.