Ellison's AI-Fuelled Surge Closes on Page for #2

TL;DR

Ellison added ~US$71B in May 2026 alone as Oracle shares hit a 2026 intraday high of US$233.72 on 1 June, capping software's strongest month since 2001.
As of 1 June he sits at US$266–276B (Forbes real-time vs. Forbes Australia month-end snapshot), having leapfrogged Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin into the #3 slot — with Larry Page (~US$300B+) the only non-Musk billionaire still ahead.
The engine is a US$300B, five-year contract with OpenAI — the largest tech contract ever signed — under which Oracle delivers 4.5 GW of dedicated AI capacity and houses 2 million+ Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. Remaining Performance Obligations now exceed US$455B.
Q3 FY26 confirmed the re-rating: total revenue US$17.2B (+22% YoY) and OCI revenue US$4.9B (+84% YoY) — the sixth consecutive quarter of accelerating infrastructure growth. Oracle now captures an estimated 35% of new AI training workloads.
Ellison personally guaranteed up to US$45.7B in equity to win the US$110.9B Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery for his son David — bringing CNN, HBO, the Warner studios and a combined ~200M streaming subscribers under family control. Closing targeted Q3 2026.
The top-10 list is now ~US$2.9T combined — and AI-infrastructure exposure (Oracle, Dell, Nvidia-linked positions) is the single biggest determinant of upward movement.

What happened

On Friday 29 May 2026, Oracle shares surged roughly 11%, then pushed to a 2026 intraday high of US$233.72 on Monday 1 June. The two-session move added more than US$13.5B to Larry Ellison's net worth in a single day, and capped a May in which he added an estimated US$71B — the largest monthly gain on the Forbes real-time list and one of the largest single-month wealth increases ever recorded for an individual.

That puts the 81-year-old Oracle co-founder, who still holds roughly 40% of the company, at US$266–276B depending on which snapshot you use. He has now overtaken Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin to reclaim the #3 spot, and is closing rapidly on Larry Page (~US$300B+) for #2. Elon Musk remains #1.

It is a remarkable second act. Ellison built Oracle into the world's dominant relational-database vendor through the 1990s, reaching a US$150B market cap at the dot-com peak. Twenty-five years later he is doing it again — this time as the AI era's preferred infrastructure landlord, renting compute capacity to OpenAI and other frontier labs. Oracle's market value briefly approached US$1 trillion in September 2025 and has stayed in striking distance since.

The deal that re-rated Oracle: US$300B with OpenAI

The single most important number behind Ellison's surge is the US$300B, five-year contract with OpenAI, finalised in September 2025 and fully activated by February 2026. The contract has three properties that have permanently changed how the market values Oracle:

Scale: Under the agreement, Oracle is expected to begin contributing more than US$30B per year in revenue from OpenAI alone starting in FY28 — equivalent to roughly US$82M every single day. Across five years it is, by consensus, the largest business-to-business contract ever signed in any industry.
Substance: Oracle is delivering 4.5 GW of dedicated AI capacity — roughly the energy footprint of 4 million homes — housing over 2 million Nvidia Blackwell-series GPUs across the Stargate I site in Abilene, Texas, plus expansion sites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Pennsylvania.
Lock-in: Management has emphasised that the contract is non-cancellable, putting a hard floor under Oracle's long-term valuation even as it carries the US$100B+ in corporate debt required to finance the build-out.

The consequence shows up on the balance sheet. Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) — contracted but not-yet-recognised revenue — now exceed US$455B, and combined hyperscaler RPO across Google Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft and AWS has crossed US$2 trillion, a number that did not exist as a market category twelve months ago.

In Q3 FY26 (reported March 2026), Oracle delivered US$17.2B in total revenue (+22% YoY) and OCI revenue of US$4.9B (+84% YoY) — the sixth consecutive quarter of accelerating infrastructure growth. Larry Ellison's own forward forecast remains aggressive: OCI revenue is guided from US$18B in FY26 to US$32B, US$73B, US$114B and US$144B across the subsequent four years. Most of that is, on Oracle's own numbers, already booked in RPO.

Stargate: the political-economy scaffolding

The Oracle–OpenAI contract is the commercial expression of a much larger structure: Stargate LLC, the US$500B AI-infrastructure joint venture announced at the White House on 21 January 2025 by Sam Altman, Larry Ellison and Masayoshi Son alongside President Trump. The venture is 40% OpenAI / 40% SoftBank / Oracle + MGX minority and targets 10 GW of total capacity by end of 2025, with nearly 7 GW already in the pipeline across Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and the Midwest, representing >US$400B of committed investment.

Materially for Ellison, Stargate was designated critical national infrastructure under the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, streamlining the grid-connection and permitting hurdles that have historically constrained data-centre build-outs. The political access matters: Ellison has used the same channels to position Oracle as the US data custodian for TikTok, and is widely understood to be the most influential technology executive inside the current White House.

The headline implication is uncomfortable but worth saying clearly: AI infrastructure has become an industrial policy, and the world's #3 fortune is now built primarily on access to that policy.

The media play: a US$110.9B family deal

The second pillar of the Ellison story is the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance for US$110.9B (US$31/share cash), formally announced on 27 February 2026 after a bruising auction in which Netflix walked away rather than match the bid. The deal is run by David Ellison (Larry's son) as Paramount Skydance's chair and CEO, but it would not exist without his father:

Larry Ellison personally guaranteed up to US$45.7B in the equity required to close, leveraging his Oracle holdings, after Warner's board questioned Paramount's financing certainty.
Total financing comprises ~US$47B in equity from the Ellison family and RedBird Capital plus US$54–57.5B in debt commitments from Bank of America, Citigroup and Apollo Global Management.
The combined company will carry approximately US$79–90B in net debt and has committed to extract US$6B in annual cost synergies — a number the trade press is already translating into thousands of layoffs across CBS News, CNN, the studio system, and the Paramount+ / HBO Max integration.
Closing is targeted for Q3 2026, with US Justice Department antitrust review and EU, UK and Canadian regulatory filings under way. As of 1 June 2026, David Ellison has personally met DoJ antitrust lawyers; the political tailwind is widely viewed as decisive.

If the deal closes, the Ellison family will control CNN, CBS, HBO, HBO Max, Paramount+, the Warner Bros. film and television studios, Food Network, TBS, MTV, Nickelodeon and BET — and approximately 23.6% of the North American media market. The combined streaming footprint of ~200M subscribers would make it the only credible scale competitor to Netflix.

Notably, executives have publicly stated the merged company will be operated as "AI-native", with Oracle's cloud and "Agentic AI" systems automating development, pre-production and post-production workflows. That closes the loop: the same compute backbone that runs OpenAI will also run the largest combined Hollywood studio.

Why the rally is structural, not a stock pop

Four structural shifts sit behind the headline number:

AI compute is the new oil-and-gas. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has positioned itself as a neutral, hyperscaler-grade landlord to AI labs that don't want to host on a direct competitor's cloud. Renting GPU capacity to OpenAI — historically a Microsoft Azure customer — is the canonical example, and Oracle has displaced Microsoft as OpenAI's primary Stargate partner.
Energy and copper are the new binding constraints. The industry has shifted from a software bottleneck to a physical one. 4.5 GW is not a number you can ship from a chip fab; it requires substations, transformers, water and political will. Oracle's first-mover position on permitted gigawatt-scale sites is now an irreplaceable asset.
Top-10 wealth is being rewritten by AI exposure. Michael Dell added US$35.8B in a single day (29 May) on a blowout quarter analysts called "one of the most impressive we've seen," overtaking Mark Zuckerberg into the #6 slot. The combined wealth of the top 10 now sits at ~US$2.9 trillion — and AI-infrastructure exposure is the most reliable predictor of upward movement.
Succession is being engineered, not improvised. In late 2025 Oracle named Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia as co-CEOs, with Safra Katz moving to executive vice chair and Ellison remaining CTO and executive chairman. Magouyrk — a founder of Oracle's cloud engineering team — is the clearest possible signal that the AI-infrastructure thesis is now the entire strategy.

What it means for boards and investors

Hyperscaler concentration risk is shifting, not disappearing. Oracle's emergence as a credible fourth hyperscaler (now capturing ~35% of new AI training workloads) gives buyers genuine negotiating leverage for the first time in five years. Procurement and sourcing teams should reopen 2024–25 cloud commitments and benchmark OCI alongside AWS, Azure and GCP for new AI workloads.
Compute-as-real-estate is now a board-level thesis. When the world's #3 fortune is built on renting GPUs to AI labs, the message to enterprise CIOs is unambiguous: GPU capacity, power interconnects, and data-centre real estate are the binding constraints of the next cycle — not models, not algorithms. Treasury, real-estate and ESG functions should be in the same room as the CIO.
Content + infrastructure consolidation is back, on AI terms. If the WBD deal closes, expect a cascade of media-and-data combinations and a renewed regulatory conversation in the US, EU and Australia. The ACCC, ACMA and Department of Communications should be on watch. Australian media, telco and streaming boards should war-game the precedent before Q4 2026.
Political-economy risk is now a balance-sheet item. Stargate was made possible by an explicit US industrial-policy posture and emergency permitting. Allied jurisdictions — including Australia — will be pressured to mirror parts of it (national-interest data centres, sovereign AI capacity, energy-grid prioritisation). Boards with exposure to US data residency, defence-adjacent supply chains, or sovereign-AI tenders should refresh their geopolitical risk register.

The succession question

A final note for boards that take long-cycle views. Ellison is 81. The Oracle structure now in place — Magouyrk and Sicilia as co-CEOs, Katz as executive vice chair, Ellison as CTO/chair — combined with the David Ellison-led Paramount-WBD platform, looks less like a CEO winding down and more like a deliberate inter-generational consolidation. The Ellison family is building a vertically integrated AI-and-media estate of a scale not seen since Rockefeller-era Standard Oil, and is doing so with the explicit political backing of the sitting US administration. Whether one views that as the natural endpoint of the AI capital cycle or a structural risk for democratic capitalism, it is unquestionably the most consequential single-family corporate story in motion in 2026.

Sources

Forbes — Larry Ellison Becomes Third-Richest Man As Oracle Shares Hit Year's High (1 June 2026)
Forbes Australia — Top 10 Richest People in the World, June 2026
Forbes — How Ellison, Son, Saylor and Other Billionaires Are Rewriting Their Legacies (2 June 2026)
Forbes — Michael Dell Adds US$35B on Dell's Best Day Ever (29 May 2026)
Financial Content / MarketMinute — Oracle's US$300B Gamble: Inside the 4.5GW Stargate Deal (12 February 2026)
Cloud Wars — Larry Ellison and Oracle Beat Microsoft for Largest Tech Contract Ever: US$100B+ OpenAI Stargate Deal
Oracle Investor Relations — Q1 FY26 Financial Results (September 2025)
Financial Content — Oracle's AI Renaissance: Q3 FY26 84% OCI Growth (12 March 2026)
Wikipedia — Stargate LLC
Wikipedia — Proposed Acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance
Los Angeles Times — Power, Politics and a US$2.8B Exit: How Paramount Won Warners (27 February 2026)
Observer — How Larry Ellison is Shaping the Future of AI, Media and Hollywood (27 March 2026)
Los Angeles Times — Paramount's Delrahim on the Regulatory Path for the WBD Deal (1 June 2026)