The net worth of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison increased by $12 billion after the company announced a surprising rise in revenues from its cloud computing software sales. According to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, Ellison ranks ninth among the world's wealthiest individuals with a fortune of $119.5 billion, following former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and ahead of Warren Buffett.
The 77-year-old Ellison owns more than 40% of Oracle, an enterprise software company he co-founded in 1977, where he still serves as chairman and chief technology officer. While Ellison's shares in Oracle constitute about 75% of his wealth, he also holds $15 billion worth of shares in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, making him one of its largest individual shareholders.
Oracle's stock rose by 16% on Friday after the software giant based in Austin, Texas, released its second-quarter financial results. For years, Oracle has sought to close the market share gap in cloud computing that separates it from industry leaders like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
During the earnings call on Thursday, Ellison took a jab at Amazon's cloud service, which suffered an outage last week when a power failure disrupted package deliveries and halted critical streaming services. Ellison noted that he received feedback from a user of Oracle's cloud services, who mentioned that the standout feature of Oracle's cloud services compared to others is that they never experience outages.
