This year is a good year Larry Ellison.

Oracle’s The software company the co-founder founded in 1979 has experienced its biggest share price rise since 1999 and the dot-com boom, leaving him with a paper fortune of about $75 billion.

According to data, while the S&P 500 index rose 27% in 2024, Oracle’s stock price rose 63%, bringing Ellison’s net worth to more than $217 billion. Forbesonly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos Be among the richest people in the world.

Ellison, 80, is a veteran of the technology industry, while his fellow billionaire founders are often decades younger. Yuan CEO Mark ZuckerbergHis net worth has also soared to more than $200 billion, and he is only half his age.

But Ellison found a fountain of youth both personally and professionally. After several divorces, Ellison report Had a relationship with a 33-year-old woman this month. At a meeting with analysts in Las Vegas in September, Ellison was as engaged as ever, casually mentioning that the night before he and his son were having dinner with his good friend Musk, who was elected Advisor to President Donald Trump (then a Republican). Nominator) while running Tesla and his other ventures.

His big financial gain comes from Oracle, which entered the artificial intelligence boom with its cloud infrastructure technology and made its databases more accessible.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI said in June that it would use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Earlier this month, Oracle explain It also received support from Yuan.

Startups often choose market leaders Amazon Web services have also been attracting Oracle when it comes to choosing the cloud. Last year, video generation startup Genmo built a system to train AI models NVIDIA Graphics processing units (GPUs) in Oracle Cloud, said CEO Paras Jain. Genmo now relies on Oracle Cloud to produce videos based on prompts users enter on its website.

“Oracle makes products that are different from what’s available elsewhere using GPU computing,” Jain said. He said the “bare metal” computers the company offers can sometimes produce better performance than architectures with server virtualization.

in its latest earnings report Earlier this month, Oracle’s results fell short of analysts’ expectations and it issued forecasts that were weaker than Wall Street’s expectations. The stock had its worst day of 2024, falling nearly 7% and eating into this year’s gains.

Still, Ellison is optimistic about the future.

Ellison said in the earnings report: “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trains some of the world’s most important generative artificial intelligence models because we are faster and cheaper than other clouds.”

For the fiscal year ending in May, Oracle expects revenue to grow about 10%, which would be its second-strongest expansion year since 2011.

Jain said that when Genmo encounters challenges, he communicates with Oracle sales executives and engineers through Slack channels. He said the partnership resulted in better reliability and performance. He said Oracle is working with Genmo to ensure developers can launch the startup’s Mochi open-source video generator on Oracle’s cloud hardware with just one click.

“Oracle is also more price competitive than these large hyperscalers,” Jain said.

Three months before its December earnings report, Oracle gave an optimistic outlook for the next three years at an analyst event in Las Vegas. Executive Vice President Doug Kehring announced that the company’s revenue in fiscal 2026 will exceed $66 billion. Over $104 billion In fiscal year 2029, the numbers show accelerated growth, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 16%, compared with a compound annual growth rate of 9% in fiscal year 2029 most recent quarter.

After Kehring and CEO Safra Catz spoke, it was Ellison’s turn. The company’s chairman, technology chief and largest shareholder strutted onto the stage in a black sweater and jeans, waved to analysts, licked his lips, and sat down. Over the next 74 minutes, he answered questions from seven analysts.

“Did he say $104 billion?” Ellison said of Kaelin’s prediction. Some in the crowd chuckled. “That would be easy. It’s kind of crazy.”

Oracle’s fiscal 2023 revenue is just under $50 billion.

The new target impressed Eric Lynch, managing director of Scharf Investments, which held $167 million worth of Oracle stock at the end of September.

“For a company that’s been in the single digits for a decade or so, that’s incredible,” Lynch told CNBC.

Oracle still lags far behind when it comes to cloud infrastructure. In 2023, Amazon controlled 39% of the market, followed by Microsoft with 23%, Google According to data from industry research firm Gartner, this ratio is 8.2%. Oracle only has 1.4% left.

But in the field of database software, Oracle is still a mainstay. Gartner predicts that the company will account for 17% of the market share in database management systems by 2023.

Ellison’s challenge is finding expansion opportunities.

Last year, he Visit Microsoft Headquarters In Redmond, Washington, a partnership was announced for the first time to enable organizations to use Oracle’s database through Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft even has Oracle hardware installed in its data centers.

In June, Oracle launched Similar announcements with Google. Then, in September, Oracle finally partnered with Amazon, Introducing its database on AWS.

Oracle and Amazon have been at each other’s throats for years. AWS launched a database called Aurora in 2014 as Amazon worked to move away from Oracle. follow CNBC reports On hard work, Ellison expressed doubts About Amazon’s ability to achieve its goals. But the project was successful.

In 2019, Amazon released blog post The title is “Migration Complete – Amazon Consumer Business Just Shuts Down Its Final Oracle Database.”

Oracle Health is estimated to lose U.S. market share in 2023, unlike rival Epic Klass Research. But Evercore analysts said in a report last week that Ellison’s relationship with Musk could benefit Oracle Health “if there is an increased effort to modernize the existing health care system” and Musk will co-lead Trump Department of Government Efficiency. They recommend buying the stock.

Ellison said at the analyst event that Oracle is currently busy rewriting Cerner’s entire code base using artificial intelligence.

“This is another pillar of growth,” he said. “I think you haven’t seen it clearly yet.”

A few hours earlier, Ellison had called the company’s co-founder and CEO, Marc Benioff. salesperson. Benioff knows Ellison as well as anyone. He worked for Ellison for 13 years before starting the cloud software company that has become a major competition for Ellison. opponent.

“It was awesome,” Benioff said of his conversation with Ellison in a wide-ranging interview the next day.

Benioff discussed his former boss’s recent fortune.

“Larry really, really wanted this,” Benioff said. “It’s very important to him, he’s building a great company, he thinks it’s one of the most important companies in the world, and wealth is very important to him.”

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