Elon Musk Only Let Larry Ellison Wear The World's Richest Human Crown For A Day

Last Wednesday, Larry Ellison became just the 19th person in the last 200 years to wear the crown of the richest person in the world. Larry took the crown from Elon Musk. Considering they are good friends, you might think Elon would let Ellison enjoy his time at the top for a few weeks or months. Nope. Elon snatched that crown right back after less than a day.

Ellison's historic wealth surge began after Oracle released its fiscal first-quarter results on the evening of September 9, 2025.

The company reported quarterly revenue of $14.9 billion, including $7.2 billion in cloud revenue. Those figures were solid, but they were not what caused investors to lose their minds.

The number that electrified Wall Street was $455 billion.

That was the value of Oracle's remaining performance obligations, or RPO, the amount of contracted business that customers had committed to purchase but Oracle had not yet recognized as revenue. Oracle's RPO had increased 359% in a single year.

CEO Safra Catz revealed that Oracle had signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three customers during the quarter. The company also expected to sign several additional multibillion-dollar contracts in the coming months.

Much of that new demand was tied to artificial intelligence companies racing to secure the enormous amounts of computing power needed to train and operate their models.

Oracle also issued a staggering long-term forecast for its cloud infrastructure division. The company projected that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue would increase 77% to $18 billion during the current fiscal year. From there, Oracle expected annual infrastructure revenue to rise to:

• $32 billion
• $73 billion
• $114 billion
• $144 billion

In other words, Oracle was telling investors that a division generating less than $20 billion annually could become a $144 billion business within four years. Investors responded by revaluing the entire company overnight.

How Larry Ellison Made $100 Billion in One Day

Larry Ellison's fortune is unusually sensitive to Oracle's stock price because he owns an unusually large percentage of the company he founded.

According to Oracle's official shareholder disclosure, Ellison beneficially owned 1,158,232,353 Oracle shares, representing 40.6% of the company.

That means every $1 increase in Oracle's share price adds $1.16 billion to the gross value of Ellison's holdings.

At Oracle's September 9 closing price of $241.51, Ellison's stake was worth:

$279.7 billion

When Oracle reached an intraday high of $345.72 on September 10, the same shares were worth:

$400.4 billion

At that moment, Ellison's Oracle stake alone had increased in value by $120.7 billion.

Oracle ultimately closed the trading session at $328.33, up nearly 36% for the day. At that closing price, Ellison's stake was worth $380.3 billion, still $100.6 billion more than it had been worth 24 hours earlier.

After adding Ellison's other assets, including his Tesla investment, extensive real estate portfolio, ownership of most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai and other investments, while accounting for known liabilities, CelebrityNetWorth placed his peak fortune at $400 billion. That was just enough to overtake Musk.

Ellison's Reign Lasted Less Than a Day

Oracle's rally began losing momentum almost as soon as Ellison reached the top.

After touching $345.72 on September 10, Oracle closed at $328.33. The following day, it fell to $307.86.

That decline from Wednesday's closing price erased $23.7 billion from the value of Ellison's Oracle holdings. Compared with the previous day's intraday peak, his stake had lost nearly $44 billion in value.

At the same time, Tesla shares were moving in the opposite direction, increasing the value of Elon Musk's holdings.

By Thursday morning, CelebrityNetWorth's calculations placed Ellison's fortune at $363 billion and Musk's at $399 billion.

Larry had held the crown for less than 24 hours.

BTW, you might assume there are lots of photos of Larry and Elon together in Getty Images. Nope. There's just one. And it's a group photo. Here it is (Larry is the far right):

(Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

Elon Musk's $1 Billion Counterpunch

On Monday morning, before the markets opened, it was disclosed that Elon had spent $1 billion of his own money to acquire additional shares of Tesla. The disclosure immediately sparked a rally in Tesla stock. By the end of trading on Monday, Tesla had increased 3.62%. With Tesla trading at $410 per share, plus his other assets, Musk's net worth now sits at $430 billion.

Fun fact: Elon's $1 billion purchase increased Tesla's market cap by $40 billion, from $1.28 trillion to $1.32 trillion. If you do the math, Elon spent $1 billion to make $8 billion on paper in a matter of hours 🙂

Oracle also had a good Monday, with the company's share price increasing 3.4% on the day. That leaves Larry with a net worth of $361 billion.

Peak Elon

Amazingly, $430 billion isn't even Elon's peak net worth. In mid-December of last year, when Tesla shares briefly hit $440 (for reference, it closed at $410 today), Elon's net worth hit an all-time high of $485 billion, and he was a hair shy of becoming the world's first HALF TRILLIONAIRE.

$1 Trillion Pay Package

As if reclaiming the world's richest crown wasn't enough, Elon Musk could soon have an entirely new windfall coming his way. Earlier this month, Tesla's board unveiled a proposed $975 billion incentive package for Musk — the largest executive pay plan in history.

The plan stretches over the next decade and is divided into 12 tranches of stock awards. Each tranche unlocks if Tesla achieves a combination of market cap and operational milestones. For market value alone, the benchmarks start at $2 trillion — up from about $1.3 trillion today — and top out at a staggering $8.5 trillion. Operational targets include producing 20 million vehicles, reaching 10 million Full Self-Driving subscriptions, and deploying 1 million robotaxis and 1 million humanoid robots.

If fully awarded, the package would give Musk more than 423 million additional shares, boosting his ownership stake to about 25% of Tesla. At the peak incentive target, that would translate into control of roughly $2.1 trillion worth of stock in an $8.5 trillion company.

But even with that incredible and almost impossible to comprehend incentive package, I still maintain that Larry Ellison actually has a much clearer path to becoming the world's first trillionaire.