Oracle stock soars 40% as it projects half a trillion dollars in revenue, setting Ellison up for $90B gain

Oracle shares surged nearly 40% Wednesday – on track for its best day since 1999 – on jaw-dropping projections that the software giant will reap half a trillion dollars in the future from its AI business.In the first quarter, Oracle signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three separate customers, CEO Safra Catz said in an earnings release on Tuesday.“We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta and many others,” Catz said during a call with investors after the earnings report.Those deals pushed Oracle’s Remaining Performance Obligations – or future revenue it will deliver based on contracts – up 359% to $455 billion.Oracle expects to sign several more multibillion-dollar contracts, and for its RPO to exceed half a trillion dollars, Catz said.The stock surge positioned Larry Ellison, 81, who co-founded Oracle and now serves as chairman, within spitting distance of overtaking Elon Musk, the world’s richest person with a net worth of $384 billion.Ellison owns about 1.16 billion shares of Oracle, and is on track to see a record-breaking gain of roughly $90 billion if Tuesday’s stock holds – more than any human has ever made in a single day.The software company has made its fortune by stockpiling a massive supply of Nvidia AI chips and renting out its computing power through its cloud business to tech giants like Amazon and Google.It expects its cloud revenue to jump to $144 billion by its 2030 fiscal year – a massive jump from its projection of less than $20 billion in its current fiscal year.“We expect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year – and then increase to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion over the subsequent four years,” Catz said Tuesday.Like many others in the industry, Oracle has funneled billions of dollars into its AI investments.To save on costs, the company has laid off workers and reportedly discussed...