Oracle (ORCL.US) shares hit their best week since 2021 as Chairman Ellison briefly surpassed Bezos as the world's second-richest person
This week was Oracle (ORCL.US) best week since 2021, gaining nearly 14.3%, boosting the net worth of its chairman Larry Ellison, who briefly surpassed Amazon (AMZN.US) founder Jeff Bezos as the world's second richest person on Friday.
Ellison's net worth briefly reached $208.4 billion at the start of trading, according to the Forbes real-time billionaires list, before falling to $197 billion. Bezos' net worth is $204 billion and he has frequently been the world's second richest person in recent years.
Oracle's shares rose slightly on Friday, closing at $162.03, after the company raised its revenue guidance for fiscal 2026 at its annual CloudWorld conference and optimistically forecast through fiscal 2029. On Tuesday, Oracle's shares rose 11% after the company reported a better-than-expected quarterly earnings. This year, Oracle's shares have risen about 54%, trailing only Nvidia (NVDA.US), the artificial intelligence chipmaker, which has gained 141%.
Ellison, who co-founded Oracle, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this stock run, owning about 40% of the company and its largest shareholder. Oracle has been revived in recent years due to its improvement in cloud infrastructure and the widespread adoption of its cloud databases.
Bezos, 60, and Ellison, 80, have been competing for the No. 2 spot on the global billionaires list, as they announced a new partnership between their companies three days ago. On Monday, Oracle said its database software would be available on Oracle hardware in Amazon's data centers for AWS customers.
Oracle has also established similar partnerships with other leading cloud infrastructure companies such as Microsoft (MSFT.US) and Google (GOOG.US, GOOGL.US) over the past year. Ellison said on this week's earnings call that Oracle is well positioned in both the cloud and traditional data center space.
"The fact that the Oracle database can run on AWS, Microsoft and Google platforms is very important. It will greatly accelerate our database growth in the public cloud. But we expect the private cloud to be many times larger than the public cloud, as companies are more willing to deploy Oracle Cloud behind their own firewall, in their own data centers, rather than sharing with a neighbor," Ellison said on the call.