How Did Larry Ellison Lose US$25bn of Net Worth in One Day?

Oracle Co-Founder Larry Ellison took a US$25bn loss on his net worth on 11 December, according to estimates on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

This places him in third place after Tesla, SpaceX and xAI CEO Elon Musk in first place and former CEO of Google Larry Page in second.

After the software giant’s shares fell due to weaker-than-expected earnings results, Larry’s net worth dropped to US$248bn - marking one of the biggest wealth drops in 2025.

Oracle’s shares sank 14% after it reported revenue of US$16.1bn for September to November, the company reported on 10 November. This compares to analyst predictions of US$16.2bn, according to the BBC.

Revenue growth was up 14% thanks to a 68% surge in sales in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, its AI business, however this was not enough to stop the significant drop in shares.

In a widely reported statement from Larry on 10 December, the Founder said: “There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years and we must remain agile in response to those changes.”

He added: “We will continue to buy the latest GPUs from Nvidia, but we need to be prepared and able to deploy whatever chips our customers want to buy.” This refers to a policy of Larry’s which means Oracle will buy whatever company’s chips to best meet client needs.

Ranging success in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 

In September, Oracle’s shares surged over 40% due to strong forecasts for its cloud business. Its shares have since lost 40% of their value since September, but are still higher than they were at the start of the year.

On an analysts call on 10 December, concerns were reportedly raised over the scale and cost of the cloud business. Oracle’s Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk responded to fears that the company might need more than US$100bn to build out its data centres.

He said: “We expect we will need less, if not substantially less, money raised than that.”

At the time of the shares surge, Larry got a taste of what it means to be the world’s richest man, overtaking Elon, all thanks to Oracle’s AI boom. He still remains ahead of many tech legends, including Amazon’s ex chief Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

On the 12 December, the top five richest people, according to Bloomberg’s Index, are: 

1. Elon Musk - US$462bn
2. Larry Page - US$268bn
3. Larry Ellison - US$258bn
4. Jeff Bezos - US$253bn
5. Sergy Brin - US$250bn

From startup to success

Larry co-founded Oracle in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, initially naming the company Software Development Laboratories and funding it with just a few thousand dollars. 

Larry saw an opportunity to commercialise this new way of storing and querying data when large vendors were moving slowly. 

An early contract to build a database for the CIA, code-named “Oracle,” provided crucial funding and the name that later became the company’s identity.​

His strategy to make Oracle successful centred on three pillars: being early to market with an SQL-based relational database, making it run on many different hardware systems and driving very aggressive sales and marketing. 

He expanded from databases into a full suite of enterprise applications and pursued large acquisitions such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA Systems, and Sun Microsystems, turning Oracle into a broad enterprise and cloud platform and securing long-term dominance in corporate IT.