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Larry Ellison, chief technology officer of Oracle (L), and Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon.

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Oracle‘s best week on the stock market since 2021 has bolstered Chairman Larry Ellison’s net worth, briefly edging him past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Friday to become the world’s second-richest person.

Ellison’s net worth reached $208.4 billion shortly after the market open, then fell to $199 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. Bezos, who has claimed the title of world’s second-richest person on and off over the years, is worth $205 billion. Only Tesla CEO Elon Musk, at $252 billion, is currently above him.

Oracle shares gained 1.2% to $163.38 on Friday after the database vendor bumped up its fiscal 2026 revenue guidance and issued a rosy forecast as far out as fiscal 2029. The company issued the forward-looking revenue figures at its annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas.

The stock rallied 11% on Tuesday after the company reported quarterly results that topped expectations. Oracle shares continue to reach new highs and are now up about 56% this year, behind only artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia — up 139% — among large-cap tech stocks.

Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977, has been the biggest beneficiary of the boom. He owns about 40% of the outstanding stock, making him the company’s biggest stakeholder. His company’s revival in recent years has been sparked by its improving position in cloud infrastructure and growing adoption of its cloud databases.

Bezos, 60, and Ellison, 80, are jockeying for the title of world’s second-richest person three days after their companies forged a new partnership. On Monday, Oracle said its database software will become available for AWS customers to use atop Oracle hardware sitting inside of Amazon data centers.

Over the past year, Oracle has also forged similar partnerships with Microsoft and Google, the other two leading cloud infrastructure companies. Ellison told analysts on this week’s earnings call that Oracle is now in prime position in the cloud and in traditional data centers.

“With Oracle Database to be able to run AWS, Microsoft and Google, is incredibly important,” Ellison said on the call. “It will absolutely accelerate database growth in the public cloud. But we expect that private clouds will greatly outnumber public clouds as companies decide they don’t want — they want the Oracle Cloud behind their firewall, in their datacenter, with no neighbors.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Ari Levy contributed reporting.

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

Undecided on location

Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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