As the company's stock surged by as much as 43% and his personal fortune grew by $90 billion over the course of a single day, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, briefly became the world's wealthiest person, surpassing Tesla's Elon Musk, NBC News reported.
The news came as Oracle released its quarterly earnings figures, revealing nearly half-a-trillion dollars worth of massive contracts with companies like ChatGPT-creator OpenAI and AI-chipmaker Nvidia. Oracle has seen its business boom as its software has increasingly been used to run the enormous data centers necessary to power cloud computing and AI models.
While Musk had regained his position atop Bloomberg's Billionaire Index by the end of the day, Oracle made clear that it had more large deals in the pipeline.
"Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers," Oracle said, per NBC News.
As Ellison and Musk tussled for the title of richest human on Earth, it served as a reminder of the world's massive wealth inequality as well as the threat that artificial intelligence poses to millions of jobs around the world.
Experts have long warned that artificial intelligence would lead to massive profits enjoyed by a relatively small group of people while leading to mass unemployment for millions if not billions of others.
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"What's actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers," Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes referred to as the "Godfather of AI," told the Financial Times during a recent interview. "It's going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer."
Additionally, the focus on Oracle's massive growth in data-center-related revenue highlighted the impact these massive, energy-hungry facilities have had on electricity prices and the global environment.
According to the Department of Energy, data centers accounted for 4.4% of electricity consumption in the U.S. during 2023, a figure that is expected to grow to as high as 12% by 2028, a nearly three-fold increase in just five years.
If the U.S. fails to bring enough new sources of electricity online to meet this rising demand, electricity prices will go up for everyone.
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Absolutely 👍 All of this electricity use has come at an environmental cost, as well. In 2024, Morgan Stanley forecast that, by the end of the decade, heat-trapping pollution generated by the world's data centers would reach 2.75 billion tons of carbon-equivalent, Reuters reported at the time.
As the world grapples with how to power these initiatives without additionally excessive pollution, one thing is clear: Major tech companies, and by extension their executives and board members, will continue to have massive dollar signs incentivizing further growth.
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