Larry Ellison Just Beat Elon

Welcome back apprentices! 👋

How do you make $100 billion in a single day?

Spoiler: not by cranking out chatbots or trendy apps.

One billionaire just pulled it off by cashing in on something you can’t see, can’t touch, and definitely don’t daydream about. 

And yet, it might be the most valuable thing in the AI gold rush.

In today's email

• 💸 How Larry Ellison made $100B in a day.

• ☁️ The $455B AI cloud deals powering Oracle’s surge.

• 🔍 What it means for founders, workers, investors.

• 🚀 Spot the “picks & shovels” wins in any industry.

• + New AI Tools

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Quick News 

🧑‍💻 Want to Hire AI-Fluent Humans? OpenAI just dropped its new Jobs Platform, aiming to connect AI-skilled folks with businesses and local governments that need them. It’s also launching an AI fluency certification, built right into ChatGPT, with help from partners like Walmart (yes, that Walmart). The goal? Train 10 million Americans in AI know-how by 2030 — just in time for the robots to ask us for references. The company is now recruiting, retraining, and rivaling LinkedIn while doing it.

🩺 Press 1 for Lifesaving Care. A new Emory study shows AI voice agents crushed it with seniors, helping 85% of 2,000 patients report blood pressure over the phone—no app, no tech panic. The bots even escalated issues to nurses when readings spiked, and still managed to cut costs by nearly 89% while boosting Medicare quality ratings from 1 to 4 stars. Turns out, even grandma’s giving AI a solid 9/10. AI isn’t just for chatbots and code — it’s quietly transforming eldercare, one helpful phone call at a time.

🧞‍♂️ Talk Without Talking. Boston startup Alterego just unveiled a sci-fi-sounding wearable that lets you communicate silently by reading your jaw and throat muscles—basically turning thoughts into commands. Dubbed Silent Sense, it works in loud environments, handles multiple languages, and even allows “speech” without moving your mouth. The team claims it's “near-telepathic,” which is cool... and slightly terrifying. AI-powered silent speech may be the next frontier of how we text, code, and connect.

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Oracle 
Larry Ellison Just Out-Musked Musk — Thanks to $455 Billion in Invisible AI

While you were trying to get ChatGPT to write your emails or plan your trip, Oracle was quietly signing $455 billion worth of AI infrastructure contracts — and turned that into one of the biggest single-day wealth jumps in history. So big, in fact, that Larry Ellison just leapfrogged Elon Musk to become the richest human on Earth.

And here's the twist: he didn’t do it by building robots or rocket ships or flashy AI apps. He did it by renting cloud servers. 🖥️

This isn’t just another billionaire victory lap. It’s a flashing neon sign that the real winners of the AI gold rush might not be the ones making AI—but the ones powering it from behind the curtain. If Nvidia sold the shovels (chips), Oracle owns the mine (compute). Let’s dig into how we got here — and why it matters for everyone, not just the 0.000001%.

The Oracle Boom, in Context

Earlier this week, Oracle announced it had locked in $455 billion in future AI infrastructure revenue, including a mind-bending $300 billion deal with OpenAI for cloud compute capacity. That alone guarantees Oracle roughly $60 billion a year starting in 2027, as OpenAI locks in the high-performance compute it needs to keep up with its LLM ambitions.

The markets? They loved it.

Oracle stock soared 40% in a single day, its biggest gain since 1992.
Larry Ellison? He gained $100 billion overnight, bringing his net worth to $400 billion+, surpassing Elon Musk’s by a decent margin.

Let’s say that again:
Larry Ellison became the richest man in the world not by building an AI app, but by selling the servers that power everyone else’s.

The Big Deals Behind the Big Deal

Here’s what Oracle’s Q3 announcement actually included:

• Four multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure contracts signed in a single quarter.
  

• The standout? Of course, the $300 billion megadeal with OpenAI, who’s locking in Oracle compute for the long haul.
  

• Oracle expects its total AI-related revenue backlog to exceed $500B in the next few quarters.
  

• The compute capacity will power LLM training, inference, and advanced AI products — likely including OpenAI’s next-gen models, agents, and enterprise tools.

No vaporware here. These are signed contracts that stretch into the 2030s.

Oracle’s Cloud Bet

This isn’t a one-time headline stunt — it’s part of Oracle’s master plan.

• Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business currently brings in $18B/year.
  

• It now projects that number will hit $144B/year by 2030 — an 8x jump in five years.
  

• And most of that is already under contract.
  

• This makes Oracle one of the only cloud providers with more future revenue locked than expected, in a space where demand is far outpacing supply.

Here’s why that’s huge: As AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini get more advanced, they don’t just need more data — they need exponentially more compute. That means more data centers, GPUs, electricity, latency reduction strategies—and above all, cloud partnerships.

Oracle has essentially booked a decade’s worth of future AI demand before most companies finished writing their roadmap.

Larry’s Riches vs. Elon’s Rockets

So how did we end up with Larry Ellison as the world’s richest man?

Let’s compare:

• Elon Musk built electric cars, reusable rockets, and a giant ad-less Twitter problem.
  

• Jeff Bezos built the everything store and AWS.
  

• Bernard Arnault built the world’s finest champagne and handbags.
  

• Larry Ellison? He built an invisible AI cloud empire.

And he did it by betting early and huge on AI-specific cloud infrastructure, through projects like Oracle Cloud, generative AI clusters, and “Stargate”, its next-gen data center initiative.

That’s significant: Ellison is the first person in history to top the wealth charts purely because of artificial intelligence. He didn’t build the product — he built the pipeline. And this probably won’t be the last time we see someone get wildly rich not from AI apps, but from AI plumbing.

Why This Isn’t Just a Rich Guy Story

Now you might be thinking: “Cool for Larry, but what does this mean for the rest of us?”

Here’s the deal:

• Founders & startups: Don’t just chase the chatbot hype. There’s massive opportunity in AI tooling, APIs, and infrastructure. Think latency, bandwidth, cost-efficiency.
  

• Tech workers: Specialize in cloud ops, distributed systems, or GPU optimization — skills tied to AI backend work, not just prompt engineering.
  

• Investors & VCs: Follow the demand surge in compute, energy, cooling, and AI logistics — the new “picks and shovels” economy.
  

• Students & career-switchers: This is your sign that the AI revolution isn’t all about apps. There’s wealth (and meaningful work) to be found under the hood.

👉 The lesson? Stop asking “which AI app will be big next” and start asking “what powers those apps?” That’s where the smart money — and, apparently, Ellison’s $400 billion fortune — lives.

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Today’s Toolbox

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You tweak it, run it, and send us your favorite. We pick one winner to feature in the next issue.

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👑 The winner is…

Last week, we challenged you to test GPT-4o’s visual generation skills with this prompt.

Here’s the WINNER:

Congrats to Tyler for his creation!🥳

Want to be featured next? Keep those generations coming!

🎨 Prompt: The Hall of First Launches

Design a grand, museum-like hall filled with suspended holographic models of humanity’s greatest first launches — from fire to space travel to the debut of [your idea, project, or product]. Each model floats in its own glowing glass sphere. The newest launch — yours — is displayed at the end of the hall on a levitating pedestal shaped like a [symbolic object], bathed in spotlight. Style: futuristic architectural realism, dramatic lighting, ambient glow, high visual contrast, sense of reverence and awe.

We’ll be featuring the best generations in our next edition!

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