Elon Musk, a tech titan and a former ally of United States President Donald Trump, has lost his title as the world’s richest person to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Musk was said to have lost the world’s richest person title following a massive surge in Oracle’s stock price.
Ellison, an 81-year-old tech mogul had a net worth that was said to have skyrocketed by $101 billion in a single day, reaching $393 billion and surpassing Musk’s $385 billion, according to a report by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Bloomberg reported that Ellison’s financial leap is the largest one-day gain ever recorded by the index.
Bloomberg also reported that Oracle’s shares had soared by 41% in early trading on Wednesday, a development that boosted Ellison’s fortune as the company’s largest individual shareholder with roughly 1.16 billion shares.
Meanwhile, Musk, on the other hand has seen his wealth fluctuating in 2025 due to Tesla’s challenges, including flagging car sales and a public fallout with Trump over policy disputes.
It was reported that Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has seen his net worth dip by nearly $80 billion in 2025 alone. Musk’s financial woes were said to be caused by Tesla’s double-digit revenue decline in the second quarter and broader market concerns over electric vehicle demand.
Pan-Atlantic Kompass reports that Musk’s dethronement as the world’s richest person came after he had been holding the top spot since overtaking Jeff Bezos in 2021.
Below are some things to know about Larry Ellison, the World’s Richest Person;
Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in the Bronx, New York, to a 19-year-old mother named Florence Spellman. Larry Ellison’s early days were marked by hardship. Nine months after he was given birth to, Ellison suffered a serious pneumonia that nearly claimed his life, leading his biological mother to give him up for adoption.
He was then raised in Chicago by his aunt Lillian and uncle Louis Ellison, a Russian immigrant who ran a grocery store.
Ellison attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but dropped out after his sophomore year following Lillian’s passing.
He briefly enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1966, studying physics and math, where he first encountered computer design. Without a degree, he moved to California and took odd jobs as a programmer for companies like Ampex Corporation. There, in the early 1970s, he was inspired by IBM researcher Edgar F. Codd’s paper on relational databases, a revolutionary way to organize data.
This kickstarted his entrepreneurial journey, leading him to co-found Software Development Laboratories in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates.
What began as a modest venture secured a huge contract from the CIA to build a database, which Ellison named “Oracle” after a fictional project in a novel.
The company released the first commercially viable relational database management system in 1979, transforming how businesses handle data.
Renamed Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982, it went public in 1986. Under Ellison’s leadership as CEO until 2014, Oracle grew into a behemoth with over $53 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue and a market cap exceeding $435 billion by early 2025.
As Chairman and CTO, he owns about 40% of the company, making his stake the core of his fortune.
