The one-day increase is the largest ever recorded by the index, eclipsing the $63 billion gain Musk registered in December 2023.
The surge was driven by Oracle’s fiscal first-quarter earnings, released late Tuesday, which handily beat Wall Street expectations and offered an optimistic outlook for cloud and artificial intelligence services.Shares of the company jumped more than 40% in early trade on Wednesday, reaching an all-time high in their sharpest single-day rise since the dot-com boom of 1999.
Ellison, 81, co-founded Oracle in 1977 and still holds around 1.16 billion shares, making him the company’s largest shareholder. The rally catapulted him past Musk, whose fortune has been dented by a 14% decline in Tesla shares this year.
Oracle reported quarterly revenue of $14.9 billion, up 12% year-on-year, with cloud revenue alone growing 28% to $7.2 billion. More striking was a 359% surge in total remaining performance obligations, to $455 billion, signalling massive demand ahead.
On the earnings call, Ellison was emphatic about the role of artificial intelligence in the company’s future. “AI changes everything,” he declared, highlighting a 1,529 per cent rise in multicloud database revenue from partners Amazon, Google and Microsoft. He also unveiled plans for the “Oracle AI Database,” designed to let customers run large language models such as Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok directly on Oracle’s systems.
The blockbuster results prompted analysts at Jefferies to raise their price target on Oracle to $360 from $270 while reiterating a “Buy” rating. The stock has now surged more than 60 per cent in the past six months.
Musk, who had held the top spot for nearly a year, reclaimed it last year after briefly losing out to Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault. His wealth remains tied largely to Tesla, which has struggled in 2025 amid cooling demand and stiffening competition.
For Ellison, the moment is unprecedented. After decades in the billionaire elite, he now sits at the very top, propelled by Oracle’s reinvention in the cloud and AI era.
