Larry Ellison and Monica Seles and Bill Gates (back row) watch Carlos Alcaraz of Spain play against Alexander Zverev of Germany in their Quarterfinal match during the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, on March 14, 2024.
Oracle’s co-founder has gained roughly $75 billion in paper wealth as the software company he started in 1979 enjoyed its biggest stock rally since 1999 and the dot-com boom.
While the S&P 500 index has gained 27% in 2024, Oracle shares have shot up 63%, lifting Ellison’s net worth to more than $217 billion, according to Forbes, behind only Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among the world’s richest people.
At 80, Ellison is a senior citizen in the tech industry, where his fellow billionaire founders are generally decades younger. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth has also ballooned past $200 billion, is half his age.
But Ellison has found the fountain of youth both personally and professionally. After being divorced several times, Ellison was reported this month to be involved with a 33-year-old woman. And at a meeting with analysts in Las Vegas in September, Ellison was as engaged as ever, mentioning offhand that the night before, he and his son were having dinner with his good friend Musk, who’s advising President-elect Donald Trump (then the Republican nominee) while running Tesla and his other ventures.
His big financial boon has come from Oracle, which has maneuvered its way into the artificial intelligence craze with its cloud infrastructure technology and has made its databases more accessible.
ChatGPT creator OpenAI said in June that it will use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Earlier this month, Oracle said it had also picked up business from Meta.
Startups, which often opt for market leader Amazon Web Services when picking a cloud, have been engaging Oracle as well. Last year, video generation startup Genmo set up a system to train an AI model with Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, in Oracle’s cloud, CEO Paras Jain said. Genmo now relies on the Oracle cloud to produce videos based on the prompts that users type in on its website.
“Oracle produced a different product than what you can get elsewhere with GPU computing,” Jain said. The company offers “bare metal” computers that can sometimes yield better performance than architectures that employ server virtualization, he said.
In its latest earnings report earlier this month, Oracle came up short of analysts’ estimates and issued a forecast that was also weaker than Wall Street was expecting. The stock had its worst day of 2024, falling almost 7% and eating into the year’s gains.
Still, Ellison was bullish for the future.
“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trains several of the world’s most important generative AI models because we are faster and less expensive than other clouds,” Ellison said in the earnings release.
For the current fiscal year, which ends in May, Oracle is expected to record revenue growth of about 10%, which would mark its second-strongest year of expansion since 2011.
Jain said that when Genmo has challenges, he communicates with Oracle sales executives and engineers through a Slack channel. The collaboration has resulted in better reliability and performance, he said. Jain said Oracle worked with Genmo to ensure that developers could launch the startup’s Mochi open-source video generator on Oracle’s cloud hardware with a single click.
“Oracle was also more price-competitive than these large hyperscalers,” Jain said.
‘That’s going to be so easy’
Three months before its December earnings report, at the analyst event in Las Vegas, Oracle had given a rosy outlook for the next three years. Executive Vice President Doug Kehring declared that the company would produce more than $66 billion in revenue in the 2026 fiscal year, and over $104 billion in fiscal 2029. The numbers suggested acceleration, with a compound annual growth rate of over 16%, compared with 9% in the latest quarter.
After Kehring and CEO Safra Catz spoke, it was Ellison’s turn. The company’s chairman, technology chief and top shareholder strutted onto the stage in a black sweater and jeans, waved to the analysts, licked his lips and sat down. For the next 74 minutes, he answered questions from seven analysts.
“Did — did he say $104 billion?” Ellison said, referring to Kehring’s projection. Some in the crowd giggled. “That’s going to be so easy. It is kind of crazy.”
Oracle’s revenue in fiscal 2023 was just shy of $50 billion.
The new target impressed Eric Lynch, managing director of Scharf Investments, which held $167 million in Oracle shares at the end of September.
“For a company doing single digits for a decade or so, that’s unbelievable,” Lynch told CNBC in an interview.
Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison delivers a keynote address during the Oracle OpenWorld on October 22, 2018 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Oracle is still far behind in cloud infrastructure. In 2023, Amazon controlled 39% share of market, followed by Microsoft at 23% and Google at 8.2%, according to industry researcher Gartner. That left Oracle with 1.4%.
But in database software, Oracle remains a stalwart. Gartner estimated that the company had 17% market share in database management systems in 2023.
Ellison’s challenge is to find opportunities for expansion.
Last year, he visited Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for the first time to announce a partnership that would enable organizations to use Oracle’s database through Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft even installed Oracle hardware in its data centers.
Oracle and Amazon had exchanged barbs for years. AWS introduced a database called Aurora in 2014, and Amazon worked hard to move itself off Oracle. Following a CNBC report on the effort, Ellison expressed doubt about Amazon’s ability to reach its goal. But the project succeeded.
In 2019, Amazon published a blog post titled, “Migration Complete – Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database.”
Friendlier vibe
Ellison looked back on the history between the two companies at the analyst meeting in September.
“I got kind of got cute commenting about Amazon uses Oracle, doesn’t use AWS, blah, blah,” he said. “And that hurt some people’s feelings. I probably shouldn’t have said it.”
He said a friend at a major New York bank had asked him to make sure the Oracle database works on AWS.
“I said, ‘Great. It makes sense to me,'” Ellison said.
The multi-cloud strategy should deliver gains in database market share, said analyst Siti Panigrahi of Mizuho, which has the equivalent of a buy rating on Oracle shares. Cloud deals related to AI will also help Oracle deliver on its promise for faster revenue growth, he said.
“Oracle right now has an end-to-end stack for enterprises to build their AI strategy,” said Panigrahi, who worked on applications at Oracle in the 2000s.
So far, Oracle has been mainly cutting high-value AI deals with the likes of OpenAI and Musk’s X.ai. Of Oracle’s $97 billion in remaining performance obligations, or revenue that hasn’t yet been recognized, 40% or 50% of it is tied to renting out GPUs, Panigrahi said.
Oracle didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Panigrahi predicts that a wider swath of enterprises will begin adopting AI, which will be a boon to Oracle given its hundreds of thousands of big customers.
There’s also promise in Oracle Health, the segment that came out of the company’s $28.2 billion acquisition of electronic health record software vendor Cerner in 2022.
Yoshiki Hayashi, Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison attend the Transformative Medicine of USC: Rebels with a Cause Gala in Santa Monica, California, on Oct. 24, 2019.
Joshua Blanchard | Getty Images
Unlike rival Epic, Oracle Health lost U.S. market share in 2023, according to estimates from KLAS Research. But Ellison’s connection to Musk, who is set to co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, might benefit Oracle Health “if there is a bigger push towards modernizing existing healthcare systems,” analysts at Evercore said in a note last week. They recommend buying the stock.
For now, Oracle is busy using AI to rewrite Cerner’s entire code base, Ellison said at the analyst event.
“This is another pillar for growth,” he said. “I think you haven’t quite seen it yet.”
Hours earlier, Ellison had put in a call to Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce. Benioff knows Ellison as well as anyone, having worked for him for 13 years before starting the cloud software company that’s now a big competitor.
“It was awesome,” Benioff said in a wide-ranging interview the next day, regarding his chat with Ellison.
Benioff spoke about his former boss’s latest run of fortune.
“Larry really deeply wants this,” Benioff said. “This is very important to him, that he is building a great company, what he believes is one of the most important companies in the world, and also, wealth is very important to him.”
Nintendo revealed the details of the Switch 2, its next game console, in a launch video on Wednesday.
The Switch 2 will hit store shelves on June 5 for $449.99. Nintendo will launch game titles including “Mario Kart World” and “Street Fighter 6” alongside the new hardware.
The new device is a bigger and faster version of the Nintendo Switch, which has sold 150 million units since it was released in 2017, making it the third-best selling game console of all time. Gamers will be able to use the Switch 2 as both a handheld console as well as hooked up to a television. The device will be able to play the existing library of Switch games as well as new and updated games that require the new hardware.
The Switch 2 looks a lot like its predecessor with some differences, including a larger 7.9-inch screen with 1080p resolution which can display gameplay at 120 frames per second. The company’s controllers, called Joy-Cons, now attach to the console’s screen with magnets, and can work as a mouse when used on a table. It comes with 256GB of internal storage.
One of the biggest changes a new “C” button that brings up a new Nintendo app for chatting with friends called Game Chat. The hardware has an improved microphone, and can support simultaneous split-screen gaming over the internet. A separate camera accessory will enable users to stream video of themselves playing the game, as well.
The improved hardware will allow for bigger worlds and more immersive experiences. For example, 24 racers can compete in Mario Kart World at the same time, Nintendo said.
Nintendo Switch 2
Courtesy: Nintendo
Nintendo console launches are a landmark for the gaming industry.
They’re hotly anticipated by fans, who want to know what games are coming, as well as game developers and publishers, who want to plan how they’ll develop for Nintendo’s lucrative platforms. Nearly 1.4 billion games and apps for the Switch have been sold during its lifetime, Nintendo has said.
Nintendo’s new gaming system comes during a period when consoles are less central to the gaming industry than ever before.
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Sony’s Playstation 5, released in 2020, has sold fewer units than its predecessor did after the same years of availability. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S is the second-straight generation of Xbox hardware with falling sales, according to analysts, and the company’s leadership has de-emphasized its consoles in favor of promoting a message that gamers can play Xbox games on phones, smart TVs, VR headsets and other hardware.
Meanwhile, companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have invested heavily in “cloud streaming,” which enables users to rent high-powered servers to run their games in the cloud. This allows gamers to play games on a web browser, as opposed to consoles they own.
Nintendo Switch 2
Courtesy: Nintendo | YouTube
Businesses prefer cloud streaming services because it turns lumpy game sales into a recurring revenue stream billed monthly, but nearly all of the companies that have given cloud streaming a go have failed to find commercial traction. Google, for example, closed its cloud streaming service in 2023. Additionally, more and more gaming is done on phones and tablets, where Apple and Google take a cut of game sales.
Nintendo continues to buck these trends.
Its Nintendo Switch, using a Nvidia chip, was underpowered by design when it was first released in 2017, and still cannot play games in 4K resolution — something that Sony and Microsoft’s consoles were able to do when the Switch was released. The Switch 2 will be able to play games in 4K resolution on televisions.
Instead of competing in terms of producing higher-fidelity and more realistic graphics, which create bigger game files and require faster hardware, Nintendo doubled down on colorful, cartoon graphics and its exclusive characters and franchises. That includes Mario, Zelda and Pokemon. These characters are increasingly moving beyond games and into movies and other media — “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” was released in 2023, and a Legend of Zelda movie is planned for 2027.
And while the Japanese company has experimented with mobile games, its consoles remain the only place to play major new titles. Nintendo regularly releases experiences that require additional physical parts to run, such as the cardboard structures of Nintendo Labo, which turned the first Switch into a virtual-reality experience for kids.
Nintendo stock, traded in Japan, is up nearly 28% so far this year in anticipation of the Switch 2. The company reported 1.67 trillion yen ($11 billion) in revenue in its fiscal 2024, which ended in May.
General view of a Tesla Store in Paramus, New Jersey, on March 20, 2025.
Kena Betancur | Getty Images
Tesla reported 336,000 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from a year ago, two days after the electric vehicle company’s stock wrapped up its worst quarter since 2022.
Shares slumped 4% following the news.
Here are the key numbers:
Total deliveries Q1 2025: 336,681
Total production Q1 2025: 362,615
Investors were expecting Tesla to report deliveries of between 360,000 and 370,000 vehicles, according to StreetAccount. Tesla’s investor relations team sends a company-compiled consensus to select analysts, and said the average estimate was for around 377,590 deliveries. Prediction market company Kalshi on Tuesday released a forecast for Tesla deliveries of 352,000.
In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla reported 386,810 deliveries, and production of 433,371 vehicles.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, typically among Tesla and CEO Elon Musk’s biggest believers, called the report a “fork in the road moment” for the electric vehicle company in a post on social media platform X.
“We knew 1Q Tesla deliveries would be soft but these numbers were bad,” he wrote. “We are not going to look at these numbers with rose colored glasses…they were a disaster on every metric. Refresh issues but brand crisis key.”
Deliveries are the closest approximation of vehicle sales reported by Tesla but are not precisely defined in the company’s shareholder communications.
Tesla doesn’t break out sales and production by model or region. However, the company said that it produced 345,454of its most popular Model 3 and Model Y cars and delivered 323,800 of them in the three months ending March 31.
The company reported 12,881 deliveries of its other models, including its angular steel Cybertruck.
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During the quarter, Tesla faced planned, partial shutdowns in some of its factories that allowed the company to upgrade manufacturing lines to start producing a redesigned version of its popular Model Y SUV.
Musk recently said during an all-hands session with Tesla employees that he expects the Model Y to be the “best-selling car on Earth again this year.”
But Tesla has to contend with an onslaught of EV competition and reputational damage. In the first quarter, the company was hit with waves of protests, boycotts and some criminal activity that targeted Tesla vehicles and facilities in response to Musk’s political rhetoric and his work as part of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
After spending $290 million to help return Trump to the White House, Musk is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where has slashed costs, eliminated regulations and cut tens of thousands of federal jobs.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has also involved himself in European politics, promoting the anti-immigrant AfD party in Germany in February’s elections. Tesla’s business on the continent is struggling.
Across 15 European countries, Tesla’s market share declined to 9.3% in the first quarter from 17.9% in the same period a year earlier, according to data tracked by EU-EVs.com. In Germany, Tesla’s market share in battery electric vehicles plummeted to 4% from about 16% over that stretch.
Sales of Tesla’s electric vehicles made in China came in at 78,828 in March, slumping 11.5% year-on-year, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association released Wednesday. The company is facing rising competition in the region from EV makers such as BYD.
Early in the quarter, Tesla claimed it sold 8,653 EVs during a single January weekend in Canada, the Toronto Star reported, qualifying it for tens of millions in EV subsidy payments that were part of a program that was ending. Canada’s transportation minister later froze the payments and is investigating the validity of the sales.
Tesla did not immediately respond to an email from CNBC asking whether the Canada numbers were included in the Q1 deliveries report.
Tesla shares sank 36% in the first quarter, their steepest drop since the fourth quarter of 2022 and third-biggest decline in the company’s 15 years on the public market. The drop wiped out $460 billion in market cap.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Tesla’s market share in Europe fell from 17.9% in the first quarter of 2024 to 9.3% in the first quarter of 2025. A previous version of this story transposed those numbers.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wears a ‘Trump Was Right About Everything!’ hat while attending a cabinet meeting at the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 24, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
Tesla sales of its China-made cars fell in March as competition from local players like BYD intensified.
Tesla sold 78,828 electric vehicles in China in March, down 11.5% year-on-year, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) released on Wednesday. However, sales rose 157% compared with the 30,688 cars bought in February.
The U.S. carmaker is facing a number of headwinds in China, in particular mounting challenges from local rivals — which, unlike Tesla, logged growth.
BYD, for example, sold 371,419 so-called new energy vehicles in March, which includes battery hybrid cars, the CPCA said. That was a 23% year-on-year rise.
Sales from Geely, which owns brands such as Volvo Cars, rose 167% year-on-year to 119,696 vehicles last month.
In a bid to push back against competition, Tesla launched a revamped Model Y in January. The automaker’s stock suffered its worst quarter in the first three months of the year in terms of performance since 2022, amid mounting pressures. The company’s shares fell 3.04% by 08:04 a.m. EST in premarket trade on Wednesday.
Concerns have meanwhile mounted that President Donald Trump’s automotive tariffs could impact Tesla’s suppliers in Mexico and China, with the White House involvement of the company’s CEO Elon Musk also receiving backlash. Musk is part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is pushing for widespread government job cuts. The tech billionaire said last month that his involvement with DOGE could be hurting Tesla’s stock, amid protests, boycotts and attacks on Tesla dealerships around the world.