It’s been a good year for Larry Ellison.

oracle The co-founder acquired around $75 billion in paper assets as the software company he founded in 1979 experienced its biggest stock rally since 1999 and the dot-com boom.

While the S&P 500 index gained 27% in 2024, Oracle shares shot up 63%, pushing Ellison’s net worth to over $217 billion, just behind, according to Forbes Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people in the world.

At 80, Ellison is a senior in the tech industry, where his fellow billionaire founders are generally decades younger. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth has also risen to over $200 billion, is half his age.

But Ellison has found the fountain of youth both personally and professionally. After several divorces, Ellison was reported to be in a relationship with a 33-year-old woman this month. And at a meeting with analysts in Las Vegas in September, Ellison was as engaged as ever, casually mentioning that he and his son had dinner the night before with his good friend Musk, who was supporting President-elect Donald Trump (then a Republican ) advises nominee) on running Tesla and his other ventures.

Its big financial boon came from Oracle, which has entered the artificial intelligence craze with its cloud infrastructure technology and made its databases more accessible.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI announced in June that it would use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Earlier this month, Oracle said it was also gaining traction Meta.

Startups that often choose the market leader Amazon Web Services also commissioned Oracle when selecting a cloud. Last year, video generation startup Genmo set up a system to train an AI model Nvidia Graphics processing units (GPUs) in Oracle’s cloud, said CEO Paras Jain. Genmo now relies on the Oracle cloud to produce videos based on the prompts users enter on its website.

“Oracle has made a different product than what you can get elsewhere with GPU computing,” Jain said. The company offers “bare metal” computers that can sometimes perform better than architectures that use server virtualization, he said.

In its most recent earnings report earlier this month, Oracle fell short of analysts’ estimates and issued guidance that was also weaker than Wall Street expected. The stock had its worst day of 2024, falling nearly 7% and eating up the year’s gains.

Nevertheless, Ellison was optimistic about the future.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trains several of the world’s most important generative AI models because we are faster and more cost-effective than other clouds,” Ellison said in the earnings release.

For the current fiscal year ending in May, Oracle is expected to post revenue growth of about 10%, which would mark its second strongest year of expansion since 2011.

Jain said Genmo communicates with Oracle sales managers and engineers through a Slack channel when challenges arise. The collaboration has resulted in better reliability and performance, he said. He said Oracle worked with Genmo to ensure developers could launch the startup’s open-source video generator Mochi with a single click on Oracle’s cloud hardware.

“Oracle was also more competitive on price than these large hyperscalers,” Jain said.

Three months before its December earnings report, Oracle gave a rosy outlook for the next three years at the analyst event in Las Vegas. Executive Vice President Doug Kehring said the company will generate revenue of more than $66 billion in fiscal 2026 and revenue of more than $104 billion in fiscal 2029. The numbers suggested an acceleration, with a compound annual growth rate of over 16% compared to 9% last quarter.

After Kehring and CEO Safra Catz spoke, it was Ellison’s turn. The company’s CEO, head of technology and top shareholder strutted onto the stage in a black sweater and jeans, waved to the analysts, licked his lips and sat down. Over 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. “It will be so easy. It’s kind of crazy.”

Oracle’s sales were almost $50 billion in the 2023 fiscal year.

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 that’s been in single digits for about a decade, that’s incredible,” Lynch said in an interview with CNBC.

Oracle is still far behind when it comes to cloud infrastructure. In 2023, Amazon controlled a market share of 39%, followed by Microsoft with 23% and Google according to industry researcher Gartner at 8.2%. That left Oracle at 1.4%.

But when it comes to database software, Oracle is still a star. Gartner estimates that the company had a 17% market share in database management systems in 2023.

Ellison’s challenge is to find ways to expand.

Last year, he visited Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for the first time to announce a partnership that would allow companies to use Oracle’s database through Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft has even installed Oracle hardware in its data centers.

In June, Oracle joined Google in making a similar announcement. Then, in September, Oracle finally partnered with Amazon and launched its database on AWS.

Oracle and Amazon had exchanged views for years. AWS introduced a database called Aurora in 2014 and Amazon worked hard to break away from Oracle. After a CNBC report on the effort, Ellison expressed doubts about Amazon’s ability to achieve 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.”

Ellison looked back at the history of the two companies at the analyst meeting in September.

“I got kind of nice comments about Amazon using Oracle, not 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 large New York bank asked him to make sure the Oracle database worked on AWS.

“I said, ‘Great. It makes sense to me,’” Ellison said.

The multi-cloud strategy should lead to gains in database market share, said Mizuho analyst Siti Panigrahi, translating into a buy rating on Oracle shares. AI-related cloud deals will also help Oracle deliver on its promise of faster revenue growth, he said.

“Oracle currently has an end-to-end stack that companies can use to develop their AI strategy,” said Panigrahi, who worked on applications at Oracle in the 2000s.

So far, Oracle has mostly struck high-value AI deals with companies like OpenAI and Musk’s X.ai. Of Oracle’s remaining $97 billion in performance obligations or revenue that has not yet been recognized, 40% or 50% of that is tied to GPU rentals, Panigrahi said.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

Panigrahi predicts that a greater number of companies will begin adopting AI, which will be a boon for Oracle given its hundreds of thousands of large customers.

Also promising is Oracle Health, the segment created by the $28.2 billion acquisition of electronic health records software provider Cerner in 2022.

Unlike rival Epic, Oracle Health lost market share in the US in 2023, according to KLAS Research estimates. But Ellison’s connection to Musk, who will co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, could benefit Oracle Health “if there is a larger push to modernize existing health systems,” analysts at Evercore said in a note last week. They recommend buying the stock.

Currently, 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 don’t think you’ve fully seen it yet.”

Hours earlier, Ellison had called Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce. Benioff knows Ellison as well as anyone, having worked for him for 13 years before founding the cloud software company that is now a major competitor.

“It was great,” Benioff said of his conversation with Ellison in a wide-ranging interview the next day.

Benioff spoke about his former boss’ recent winning streak.

“Larry really wants this,” Benioff said. “That is very important to him, that he is building a great company that he believes is one of the most important companies in the world, and wealth is also very important to him.”

REGARD: Oracle and C3.ai both made good progress with their earnings reports, says Jim Cramer