AFP, New York

Billionaire Elon Musk is at risk of losing his title as the world’s wealthiest person to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose software giant appears poised for massive AI riches through a major deal with OpenAI.

Ellison, 81, amassed about $95 billion in additional wealth Wednesday as Oracle shares skyrocketed after the nearly 50-year-old company forecast massive revenue growth thanks to large contracts that will dwarf current revenue.

That rise lifted Ellison’s overall fortune to nearly $390 billion compared with Musk’s roughly $436 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires index.

A Bloomberg wealth index placed Ellison’s bounty slightly ahead of Musk’s, designating the Oracle chief number one at the moment. The difference in the tallies relates to how some of their huge holdings are estimated.

Ellison and Musk are close friends, with the Oracle boss often coming to Musk’s aid during challenging periods in the Tesla tycoon’s career.

He invested over $1 billion in Musk’s buyout of Twitter and served on Tesla’s board for many years.

Musk’s most easily estimated holding is Tesla, whose shares have fallen in 2025 amid languishing sales attributed partly to Musk’s embrace of far-right political causes.

Tesla earlier this month unveiled a compensation proposal for Musk that could top $1 trillion through 2035 if the company hits ambitious targets. Shareholders will vote on the plan in November.

Ellison, a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, holds more than 1.1 billion shares of Oracle, accounting for more than 40 percent of the company’s equity, according to S&P Capital IQ.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz called the just-finished quarter “astonishing” as the company signed “four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers.”

Oracle projected that its cloud business revenues would grow 77 percent in the current fiscal year to $18 billion. In subsequent years, revenues are expected to rise to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion.