Larry Ellison's fortune soars $12 billion as Oracle cloud sales jump

Larry Ellison’s net worth soared $12 billion after Oracle Corp. reported a surprise increase in revenue from sales of its cloud-computing software.

Ellison ranks ninth among the world’s richest people with a $119.5 billion fortune, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s just behind former Microsoft Corp. head Steve Ballmer and one place ahead of Warren Buffett.

Ellison, 77, owns more than 40 per cent of Oracle, the enterprise software company that he co-founded in 1977 and where he still serves as chairman and chief technology officer. While Ellison’s Oracle shares make up around 75 per cent of his fortune, he also own about a $15 billion stake in electric automaker Tesla Inc., making him one of its largest individual shareholders. 

Oracle’s shares rose 16 per cent Friday after the Austin, Texas-based software giant reported fiscal second-quarter results. Oracle has sought for years to make up some of the gap in cloud computing market share that separates it from industry leaders Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft. 

In its earnings call on Thursday, Ellison jabbed at Amazon’s cloud business, which suffered a setback this week when an outage upended package deliveries and took down major streaming services.

Ellison said he received complimentary feedback from a user of Oracle’s cloud services. “And the note basically said the one thing we’ve noticed about Oracle, Oracle’s cloud, is that it never ever goes down,” he said on the call. “We can’t say that about any of the other clouds.”