Larry Ellison Net Worth: $187.7 Billion, Down From a $401 Billion Peak Ten Months Earlier
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5 min read
Larry Ellison's net worth was $187.7 billion, per Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires list on 9 August 2026, ranking him 8th richest in the world. Ten months earlier, in September 2025, that same Forbes tracker had him at $401 billion, only the second person ever to cross that mark, briefly ahead of Elon Musk as the world's richest person. In between, Ellison touched five different rankings inside a single year, all on the same tracker.
No other fortune in this series has moved through that many rungs of the same ladder in ten months. The reason sits almost entirely in one stock.
| Publisher | Date | Figure | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | September 2025 | $401 billion (peak) | 1st, briefly passing Musk |
| Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | 1 June 2026 | over $300 billion | 2nd, passing Bezos, Brin and Page |
| Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | 9 June 2026 | $249.7 billion | 5th, behind Bezos, Brin and Page |
| Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | 13 July 2026 | $175.2 billion | 8th, behind Jensen Huang |
| Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | 9 August 2026 | $187.7 billion | 8th |
A separate tracker, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, put him at $178 billion, 7th richest, as of 26 July 2026 (reported by Benzinga), down $69.0 billion for the year to that point as Oracle fell 34% year-to-date. Bloomberg and Forbes do not agree on the exact rank or figure at any given moment, which is this series' standing finding. What both trackers agree on, each in its own numbers, is the direction and the scale: a fortune that gained and then lost well over $100 billion inside a single year.
Almost all of it is Oracle (ORCL) stock. Per Oracle's SEC filings, Ellison owned roughly 1.158 billion shares, about 40.6% of the company, as of mid-2025 (The Motley Fool, 29 July 2026). Oracle is not currently listed on NetWort's screener, so it is referenced here by name and ticker only.
Two details make his exposure larger than the raw stake suggests. Oracle's September 2025 proxy statement disclosed that Ellison had pledged 346 million shares, about 30% of his stake, as collateral against personal debt. Separately, in mid-2026 Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion of the financing behind Paramount Skydance's roughly $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal led by his son, David Ellison (The Motley Fool and The Hollywood Reporter, late July 2026). Britain's competition regulator cleared the merger on 6 August 2026 (U.S. News), while a coalition of 12 U.S. state attorneys general has sued to block it on antitrust grounds, a dispute over market concentration in film and television, not a claim against Ellison personally (The Motley Fool, late July 2026).
Oracle's AI-infrastructure story drove both the climb and the fall. Shares hit an intraday high near $250 on 1 June 2026, the day Ellison's fortune passed $300 billion (Forbes). From there, Oracle fell 47% by 13 July 2026, when shares closed below $133 amid growing doubt on Wall Street about whether the company's AI spending, and the debt backing it, was sustainable (Forbes). That single slide cut roughly $124.8 billion from Ellison's Forbes figure between 1 June and 13 July.
More knowable than most of this series in one sense: Oracle trades every second the market is open, and Ellison's stake is disclosed in SEC filings down to the share. There is no private holding company standing between the public and the number, unlike Anthoni Salim's stakes held through Hong Kong-listed First Pacific.
What makes the number unusually unstable is leverage layered on top of a transparent stake: pledged shares and a personal, dollar-denominated guarantee tied to a separate company's takeover bid. That combination means his headline figure can move on Oracle earnings, on a media-merger ruling, or on both at once. It is a different kind of volatility from Jensen Huang's, where Forbes and Bloomberg disagree over whether foundation shares count as his wealth. Here, the trackers broadly agree on what to count. They just cannot hold still, because what they are counting keeps moving and carries outside obligations attached to it.
A single, fully disclosed public stock is not the same thing as a stable number. Mark Zuckerberg's fortune showed a similar AI-spending-driven swing in 2026, and Elon Musk's, the person Ellison repeatedly passed and trailed in these headlines, shows the same mechanic at even larger scale. Concentration risk does not require privacy or opacity to bite. It only requires one position to be most of the portfolio.
NetWort's portfolio concentration risk explainer walks through the math of exactly how much a heavily weighted position costs on a bad day, with a worked example rather than a billionaire's headline number.