Oracle founder is 2nd richest man: Ahead of Zuckerberg, behind Musk

Yahoo

17-07-2025

Oracle (ORCL) co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison surpassed Meta (META) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the world's second richest man, behind Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg's calculations.
Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley and Market Domination Host Josh Lipton sit down with Julie Hyman on Market Catalysts to discuss Oracle's rise.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Catalysts here.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has officially surpassed Mark Zuckerberg to become the world's second richest person with a net worth of $251.2 billion. That's according to Bloomberg's billionaires index. The jump is thanks to the recent rally in Oracle shares. The stock is up over 40% year to date as investors pile into names they believe will be winners in the AI arms race. Joining me now on this Yahoo! Finance tech editor Dan Howley and market domination anchor Josh Lipton, who has followed the tech industry closely. Guys, thanks for being here. Um, on the one hand, Larry Ellison probably doesn't like to be second in anything, Josh. On the other, maybe feels good for him to edge out Mark Zuckerberg, from what we know about the sort of egos of some of these tech billionaires.
Yeah, what's incredible is you look at the move in this stock, Julie, and I was talking to Dan about this off camera, remarkable move in the stock. And analysts are still pretty bullish on this one. And you'll hear bulls talk about, yes, they'll acknowledge at this point a premium valuation, but some of them will stick with it because they do believe, in their words, you've hit this sort of pivotal moment in the evolution of Oracle as a hyperscaler, as a big cloud giant. And I was actually talking to Patrick Moorhead about this, you know, both you know Patrick. And I was just curious to ask Patrick, when you think about this landscape, what are Larry and Safra's advantages? And Patrick says, you know, I would put it at three. He said, I would say, you can have an Oracle cloud in the public cloud, but also as a private cloud, meaning a cloud computing environment that's just for you. You get, he said, a full complete stack of software. Um, and he says, let's not overthink this, it just comes down to customer choice. Like customers would prefer to have more than three. And then I asked Patrick, okay, so if you're an investor though, and you're in this for the long haul, it's three, five years out, what would be the risks you should think about? And Patrick said, you know, as always, if you're in for five years, you're already wondering what the next leg of growth is. But then he said, and Dan's point of view on this, he also said, Larry and Safra don't have their own chips. And how that shakes out over time as a potential cost disadvantage as Larry and Safra go head-to-head with the Amazon and the Microsoft and the Google.
Right. I mean, was there talk about that at some point, Oracle?
I mean, as far as, yeah, I mean, look, this is, I think developing chips is something that only a select number of companies can do, right?
It takes a lot of money and a lot of smart engineers.
Yeah, I mean, it's the Microsofts which, you know, they're still, you know, working on theirs. Uh, Amazon, they have, they've been using theirs for a while. Google's been using it for quite some time, their TPUs. Um, and you know, I think that when it comes to where you see Oracle versus these other hyperscalers is, you know, quickly, let's just go over their yearly revenue, right? So, uh, for their year 2025, they reported $57.3 billion. That's for the whole year. Let's look at Microsoft for their last year. $245.1 billion. So it's Oracle's large, but it's not hyperscale large yet, right? Like, and so I think the idea here is that people are saying, well, people are already bought into Microsoft, people are already bought into Amazon, people are already bought into Google. Oracle's right there and they're more or less doing the same thing. How do we get in there as another play for the AI space?
Does Stargate push them into hyperscale large is the question.
That's the thing, right. It depends on, it depends on A, if Stargate is ever completed, it comes to fruition, right? I mean, yes, they're building out the data center. I think when they, when they announced that they showed kind of like the footings of the building itself, right? Uh, we'll have to see though if that actually turns into that huge network of data centers.