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- Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison has seen an unrivaled $49 billion wiped off his net worth this year.
- His fortune shrank by about $9 billion to below $200 billion on Wednesday as Oracle stock slid 5%.
- Oracle and other software stocks fell on fears that new AI tools would erode customer demand.
Larry Ellison has seen an unmatched $49 billion wiped off his net worth in 2026, as this week's software rout deepened his wealth decline.
Oracle's cofounder and tech chief was worth $199 billion at Wednesday's close, down from $247 billion at the start of January, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A 5% slump in Oracle stock on Wednesday erased about $9 billion from his fortune. Investors have been offloading software stocks following Anthropic's release last week of plugins for its Claude Cowork AI agent, designed to automate legal, sales, finance, marketing, and data analysis tasks for corporations.
Tools of that kind threaten to reduce companies' need to pay for external software from industry giants such as Adobe, Salesforce, Intuit, and Atlassian. Those companies and their peers saw their stock prices tumble earlier this week before rebounding on Wednesday, as some investors may have seen the sell-off as overdone.
Ellison was one of several Big Tech bosses who saw sharp wealth declines on Wednesday, per Bloomberg's rich list.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's net worth slid by about $11 billion, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took an $8 billion blow to his fortune, and Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saw declines of around $5 billion, as all of their companies' stock prices fell by at least 2%.
Oracle has bet big on the AI boom, striking deals with key players including Nvidia and OpenAI in a bid to become a leading provider of the data centers needed to power the tech.
But the enterprise-software giant's aggressive spending and growing debt pile have raised concerns that it's overextending itself financially.
The company's "remaining performance obligations" — contracted sales not yet recognized as revenue — surged 438% year over year to $523 billion as of November 30. That figure is nearly 10 times the $53 billion of revenue it earned last fiscal year.
"Oracle didn't need to do this," Michael Burry of "The Big Short" fame, who's betting against the company's stock, said of Oracle racking up debt and banking on a huge OpenAI contract. "I don't know why it did this. It had a great business."
"I do not like how it is positioned or the investments it is making," Burry wrote in a post last month, adding that Oracle was making unneeded, hard-to-explain moves and "ego" might be the driver.
