Larry Ellison just reminded the market that Elon Musk isn’t guaranteed to be top dog forever…
This week Oracle stock exploded nearly 40% in a single session (its best jump since 1992) thanks to an AI-fuelled hype-train announcement that blew the roof off the stock price and Ellison’s wealth.
That surge added roughly $100 billion to Ellison’s personal fortune in a matter of hours.
For a brief moment, the 81-year-old tech pioneer leapfrogged Elon Musk to claim the title of richest person alive.
And if you thought that would make this a good week for the Ellison family, think again.
Because that’s a great thing for Oracle, but arguably it’s not even the biggest deal of the week for someone carrying the Ellison surname.
The who’s who of AI
Oracle’s rally wasn’t about a shiny new gadget or some “maybe one day” AI dream. It was about cold, hard, cash deals with the biggest of big tech at a level you’d expect from a tech start up minnow, not an $800 billion giant.
The company disclosed an order pipeline of $455 billion, four times what it had just a year ago. This included a $300 billion deal with OpenAI.
To meet OpenAI’s hunger for compute, Oracle is doubling its data-centre footprint.
We’re talking 4.5 gigawatts of capacity about as much power as a small country.
CEO Safra Catz said,
“We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD and many others.”
Investors liked this, piling into the stock and shoving Oracle’s market cap toward the trillion-dollar club.
For Ellison, who still owns 41% of the company, that’s hundreds of billions added to his net worth overnight. If you’ve ever wondered how billionaires keep getting richer while you’re still squinting at your brokerage account, this is how.
But Larry’s not the only Ellison extracting wealth from the market.
His son, David, has been busy writing his own chapter and sending one of the world’s biggest media and entertainment companies skyrocketing.
David Ellison’s Skydance Media recently closed an $8.4 billion takeover of Paramount Global, home of CBS, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures.
That was a big, brash move. And there were talks that Oracle (no great surprise there) would be providing cloud services to the company with the deal done.
But now reports around abound that Paramount Skydance (PSKY) is already preparing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. (WBD).
Yes, you read that right. The smaller $19 billion PSKY is trying to swallow the giant $40 billion WBD.
Cloud, content, cash money baby!
On paper, Paramount is half the size of WBD. Yet the chatter alone sent Warner’s stock up nearly 30% and Paramount up 15%.
How could it work? Simple, billionaire family leverage. When your father’s net worth swells by $100 billion in a day, and you’ve got a quasi-backing from Oracle, suddenly a “stretch” deal looks a lot less impossible.
Also, I would think this comes with the political blessings of the current U.S. government too, with no secrets that Ellison senior has pretty close ties to President Trump.
What could become of a WBD PSKY merger is an entertainment, media and content juggernaut. What becomes of CNN would be fascinating to watch as well…
The Ellisons are doing in plain view what every savvy investor dreams of. They’re extracting wealth from markets on multiple fronts, in different arenas, using different tools. Tech contracts. Media consolidation. Leverage of existing wealth and a sprinkling of political influence layered on top.
Now, you and I don’t have $300 billion cloud contracts or $8 billion cheques lying around. But the underlying principle is the same, find where the money and momentum are converging, and position yourself to ride that wave.
Use the tools at your disposal to extract wealth from a market that presents opportunities every single day (like a 40% jump in ORCL, or a 28% jump in WBD).
That’s also exactly what we’re showing readers in The New Profit Playbook, where professional trader Sean Allison (Allison with an A, not Ellison with an E…) is breaking down over four free sessions a strategy Wall Street insiders have quietly used for decades to pull in steady, leveraged income from the market.
It’s the same kind of asymmetric advantage billionaires build their empires on — except now it’s accessible to everyday investors like you.
[Click here to check out the educational series — it’s free.]
Stepping back, the Ellisons’ double-punch shows where some of the biggest fortunes are being made right now, cloud, content, and clout.
- Cloud: Oracle is turning AI demand into one of the largest backlog pipelines ever recorded. And they’re on a fast track to the trillion-dollar club.
- Content: David Ellison is stitching together a Hollywood entertainment giant that is at a scale Ted Turner dreamed about and might make Rupert Murdoch reconsider his life choices.
- Clout: With family wealth measured in hundreds of billions, and ties that run straight to the Oval Office, the Ellisons can bend deals in their favour that others couldn’t even contemplate.
For investors, the lesson is that billionaires play in industries that consolidate into fewer, bigger winners.
They double down where tech meets culture and they leverage every advantage and use every tool they have (financial, political, familial) to keep compounding and building wealth.
That might feel a world away from your own trading account. But their tools aren’t that different to yours, the scale is different, but you can put into play strategies that even the largest family offices still use.
Because while you might not make $100 billion in a day, you can still capture a slice of the same megatrends and ride the deals they make to build your own empire.
Until next time,
Sam Volkering
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily
P.S. Watching the Ellisons pull billions from AI and media this week has been wild. But their success proves one thing — the right strategy changes everything. Professional trader Sean Allison just built a new income approach you’ll want to see. Click here to learn exactly what you need to know.
