Larry Ellison has seen an unprecedented $49 billion disappear from his wealth by 2026 as this week’s software route deepened his decline in wealth.
The Oracle co-founder and chief executive was worth $199 billion as of late Wednesday, up from $247 billion at the beginning of January, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A 5% drop in Oracle’s shares on Wednesday wiped out about $9 billion from its fortune. Investors have been selling off software stocks following Anthropic’s release last week of plug-ins for its Claude Cowork AI agent, designed to automate legal, sales, finance, marketing and data analytics tasks for businesses.
Such tools threaten to reduce companies’ need to pay for third-party software from industry giants like Adobe, Salesforce, Intuit and Atlassian. These companies and their peers saw their stock prices tumble earlier this week before bouncing back on Wednesday, as some investors may have seen the sell-off as overdone.
Ellison was one of several Big Tech bosses who saw a sharp drop in wealth on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg’s rich list.
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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s net worth fell by about $11 billion, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took an $8 billion hit to his fortune, and Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saw declines of about $5 billion, while their companies’ stock prices fell by at least 2%.
Oracle has been betting big on the rise of AI, inking deals with key players including Nvidia and OpenAI in an effort to become a leading provider of the data centers needed to power the technology.
But the enterprise software giant’s aggressive spending and growing debt pile have raised concerns that the company is overextending itself financially.
The company’s “remaining performance obligations” — contracted sales not yet recognized as revenue — rose 438% year over year to $523 billion as of Nov. 30. That figure is nearly ten times the $53 billion in revenue it earned last fiscal year.
“Oracle didn’t have to do this,” Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’, who bets on the company’s stock, said of Oracle racking up debt and banking on a huge OpenAI contract. “I don’t know why it did this. It had a great business.”
“I don’t like the way it is positioned or the investments it is making,” Burry wrote in a message last month, adding that Oracle was making unnecessary, hard-to-explain moves and that “ego” could be the driving force.
