Oracle co-founder Ellison briefly overtakes Musk as world’s richest man • FRANCE 24 English

And let’s get a business update now with Sha Pelgran. Beginning with uh Elon Musk briefly losing his position as the world’s richest person. That’s right, Oliver. It was brief, but it did happen on Wednesday. Tech billionaire Larry Ellison overtook overtook Musk in the Bloomberg billionaires index after Oracle, business software company he has a 41% stake in saw its shares surge after releasing better thanex expected financial forecasts. At one point, those shares rose more than 40% before closing the session up almost 36% at over $328 a share. So that meant the 81year-old shot up to the top of the rankings uh for a bit with a net worth much larger uh than the entire GDP of Nigeria this year for instance. Uh but this Thursday, Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, uh took his place back at the top of the rankings, dominated by the men that control the largest US tech firms, as you can see there, like Mark Zuckerberg at Meta in third place, Bezos at Amazon, or Larry Page, uh one of the founders at Google. Worth noting that Elison and Musk have a close relationship. Some saying Ellison was a bit of a mentor to Musk sitting on the board at Tesla for four years and providing financial assistance um for Musk to buy Twitter in 2022. Uh they also they also share similar politics. So what was behind this sudden surge in Oracle shares and in Ellison’s net worth? Well, an earnings call with analysts that left all of Wall Street slack jawed using words like blown away or momentous or in shock. The software company said it actually missed its earnings and revenue targets uh for the quarter, but it was its forecasts which really wowed everyone specifically on its cloud infrastructure business. Oracle said it had signed four multi-billion dollar contracts in that sector with three different customers uh this quarter. One of which with Chad GPT maker OpenAI to de to develop over 4 gawatts of US data center capacity. It’s predicting that its cloud business will boom over the next four years, generating $18 billion in revenue this year and reaching, as you can see there, $144 billion in fiscal 2030. Nevertheless, this there is some risk there. Notably, with the Open AI deal, the startup might be a huge name and generating a lot of excitement, but it’s not expected to generate any profit before 2029. And Oracon’s performance fueled a bit of a tech rally on the stock market. Mhm. We’re we’re even seeing this uh in Asia this uh Thursday uh with the Nikk in Japan notching a record high of over 44, 300 300 points, though it stabilized a little bit there as you can see up currently 9/10en of a percent. Um tech investments firm Soft Bank uh jumping over 10%. What could also help is the perspective of of an interest rate cut by the US Federal Reserve on the back of concerning data with regards to the health of the US economy. And now moving on to some other news. Mexico is turning to protectionism as a result of US tariffs. Uh President Claudia Shinbal defended a budget proposal on Wednesday which would impose tariffs on more than 1,400 products, many from Asian nations. This to boost national production. This is happening at a time when Mexico is under pressure from Washington to present a unified front against what Trump believes is the unfair trade practices of China. Take a listen to Claudia Shan. What is Plan Mexico? To produce more in Mexico. To stop importing what can be produced here. So that’s why we’re increasing tariffs within the framework of the World Trade Organization to all countries with which we do not have a commercial treaty. And let’s end with Cuba’s continued struggle with its energy grid. Another blackout has plunged the whole of Cuba into darkness. The latest in a series that has been put down to the communist islands creaking infrastructure as it struggles to keep power plants fueled and running amid an enduring economic crisis. Luke Shrego reports. Life continues in Havana as fed up Cubans endure their fifth nationwide blackout on the island in a year. I left work and I’m heading home to get everything organized. On social media, they say they are working on restoring power. So, we have to wait because we have no other choice. Even before the grid collapsed on Wednesday, there’d been daily outages across the island that could last for over 16 hours. The result of antiquated power stations three or four decades old that the country doesn’t have the resources to modernize. What’s more, Cuba is still weathering an economic and energy crisis that’s only worsened in recent years due to US sanctions still in place on the communist island. Not only does Havana lack the money to renovate its obsolete oil fired power plants, which provide 80% of its total electricity. It’s also struggling to find the cash to pay for the fuel needed to run them after oil imports from Venezuela, Russia, and Mexico all dropped. Now it’s the third day of the blackout here. Everybody’s outside trying to stay cool and waiting. That is why the refrigerators are empty. If you buy something, you don’t know if you’ll be able to keep it. Last time, a lot of people lost their food. Authorities said they were trying to restore function to the thermoelectric plant said to be at fault with priority given to hospitals and food production centers. And that’s all we have time for now, but do stay with us for more news coming up on France

Larry Ellison, the 81-year-old co-founder of US business software company Oracle, briefly became the world’s richest man on Wednesday after shares in Oracle surged over 40 percent. The company is predicting that its cloud infrastructure business will grow from $10 billion to $144 billion by 2030, thanks to AI-driven demand for its services. Also in this edition: Cuba suffers another island-wide blackout – the fifth in the past year.
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8 comments

  4. Do you really believe that the real contenders for that title would ever allow their names to be publicized? Here you have a list of celebrities who are only wealthy in theory.

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