Oracle Corp. 's Larry Ellison is more than $1.3 billion wealthier than he was at the stock market’s close on Tuesday after his company reported a higher-than-expected quarterly profit as its cloud business gained traction.
Oracle
stock is up nearly 4% from Tuesday’s close of $38.74, hitting $40.23 as of midday Thursday in New York.
Ellison is worth about $48.7 billion, making him the 6th richest person in the world ahead of Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, who held the spot on Tuesday,
Forbes reported.
Facebook stock was down at $111.84.
Both billionaires hold the vast majority of their wealth in their companies’ stock, meaning that market fluctuations have a big impact on their net worths, with daily changes in the rankings of the world’s richest, Forbes explained.
With $75 billion, Bill Gates has topped this year's
Forbes' list of billionaires for the third year in a row and remains the richest person in the world. The Microsoft co-founder's net worth is down from $79.2 billion, but still at the peak of the magazine's 30th annual ranking. Gates has made the list for 17 of the last 22 years.
As a whole, 1,810 billionaires are on the list, which is down 16 people from last year. The average net worth of the billionaires on the list is $3.58 billion, having dropped $280 million from $3.86 billion in 2015. The total net worth for this year's billionaires was $6.48 trillion.
Meanwhile, Oracle also said it was boosting its stock buyback program by $10 billion,
Reuters reported.
Oracle has been investing aggressively in its Internet-based software business over the last few years in a bid to take market share away from rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Workday Inc. Revenue from its cloud-computing software and platform service rose about 57 percent to $583 million, accounting for about 6 percent of its total revenue.
"Our cloud business is now in a hyper-growth phase," Safra Catz, Oracle's co-chief executive, said in a statement.