Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has overtaken Elon Musk as the world’s richest man after the company’s stock market surged by over 40% following its quarterly earnings release on Wednesday, which showed stagnant profits but also outlined very promising future prospects.
Oracle’s stock appreciation has pushed its market capitalization to $969 billion (€827.216 billion), according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Given that Ellison owns 41% of the technology company, his net worth has reportedly increased to $397 billion (€338.911 billion). This would be enough to displace the owner of Tesla or SpaceX, whose fortune is estimated at around $384 billion (€327.81 billion), from the podium.
Oracle reported today that it earned a net profit of $2.927 billion (€2.499 billion) during its first fiscal quarter, ending in August, which represents a stagnation (-0.1%) compared to the result recorded twelve months earlier.
Revenue reached $14.926 billion (€12.742 billion), an increase of 12.2%. Broken down, the cloud computing division generated $7.186 billion (€6.135 billion), an increase of 27.8%, and the software division generated $5.721 billion (€4.884 billion), a decrease of 0.8%.
The services business generated $1.349 billion (€1.152 billion) and the hardware business generated another $670 million (€572 million), up 6.8% and 2.3%, respectively.
“In the first quarter, we signed four multi-million-dollar contracts with three different customers. This resulted in a 359% increase in our backlog, reaching $455 billion [€388.424 billion]. It was an impressive quarter, and demand for Oracle’s cloud infrastructure continues to grow,” said Oracle CEO Safra Catz.
“In the coming months, we expect to sign contracts with several additional customers worth billions of dollars, and our backlog is likely to exceed half a trillion dollars,” she added.
In addition, the company has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.50 (€0.43) per common share, payable on October 23 to all holders of common stock listed as of the close of trading on October 9.
