Larry Ellison's personal wealth is inextricably linked to Oracle and yesterday it ballooned by more than $15 billion following a 12 percent rally of Big Red's stock on the news that it is building an AI datacenter and has a deal with AI darling Nvidia.

The Oracle founder owns upwards of 40 percent of the company’s shares so the spike in stock price yesterday to more than $127 per unit had a material effect on his fortune, estimated to be closer to $146 billion now.

This is despite revenues crossing the Oracle's Q3 finishing line below analysts' expectations. The chat on a conference call with analysts where Ellison outlined some of the corporation's AI proposals was sufficient to excite Wall Street.

"We're building an AI datacenter in the United States where you could park eight Boeing 747 nose-to-tail in that one data center. We're bringing on enormous amounts of capacity over the next 24 months because demand the demand is so high," he said. Also mentioned was something about a soon-to-be-announced deal with Nvidia, which has seen its own share price rocket on the back of its GPUs used to train LLMs.

Yesterday's rally on Oracle stock follows a swing that moved in the opposite direction in December, when the price plunged 12 percent and Ellison lost $16 billion, according to Forbes.

Oracle's share price is up 52 percent in the past year, helping to swell Larry's wealth by $50 million.

Although it is hard to keep up these days, the Oracle founder is circa the fifth richest man in the world, so the money won’t make a huge amount of difference to Larry’s lifestyle, it might just mean he can upgrade the laser cannon on his Hawaiian island.

He is still well behind fellow tech tycoons in the rich list stakes, with Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk above him, and fashion brand entrepreneur Bernard Arnault topping them all with an estimated fortune of $230.5 billion.

It is an insane amount of money being amassed by the wealthiest in the world, and jaw dropping movement are based on there share prices of the organizations they run. No wonder some see AI as the 21st century gold rush. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/03/13/larry_ellison_worth_15_billion/