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Oracle founder Larry Ellison briefly passes Elon Musk to become the world’s richest man—and he has Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to thank for that

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Good morning. It’s Jeremy here, filling in for Andrew, who is now on paternity leave for a bit. So you’ll see a rotating cast of Fortune tech journalists writing this newsletter for a few weeks.

Fortune Brainstorm Tech wrapped yesterday. Here were a few highlights from the final day of the conference:

  • Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura, told the audience that while overall wearable sales are flat or even declining, sales of his company’s smart ring have more than doubled in the past year. Particularly popular is an AI-powered health coach that analyzes data from the ring and provides bespoke wellness suggestions.
  • Neil Vogel, the CEO of publisher People Inc.—whose titles include People and Food & Wine—said Google is the worst when it comes to compensating publishers for using their content to train and improve AI models. The search giant has refused to license content from news organizations and publishers, while other AI labs have done licensing deals. “Some AI shops are good actors. OpenAI is a good guy,” said Vogel. “The worst guy is Google.”
  • Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, said that starting this summer the hiring site saw a distinct shift in the most important qualifications employers were seeking in job candidates. Whereas once they favored deep technical know-how, they are increasingly looking for soft skills and people skills as AI automates some technical work and makes it easier for less technical employees to accomplish technical tasks.

Meanwhile, the tech world is talking about Oracle’s massive market gains, which have boosted Oracle founder, chairman, and chief technology officer Larry Ellison’s net worth, allowing him to surpass Elon Musk to claim the title of world’s richest man. Helping to drive Oracle’s stock was the announcement of a massive $300 billion deal with OpenAI to supply the AI company with data center capacity. (Now we know why OpenAI is telling investors it’s going to burn through $115 billion in cash by 2029.) Of course, the only reason Oracle is in this position is down to Ellison’s courting of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which has allowed his company, previously a distinct back-of-the-pack cloud company, to secure a massive stockpile of top-of-the-line Nvidia GPUs. More on Ellison’s soaring fortunes below.

Buy-now, pay-later fintech Klarna’s IPO went off, with the company’s shares gaining 15% on opening day. (Whether that “opening day pop” is a good thing is a debate for another day. It seems like the finance profs have mostly lost the argument, with bankers convincing companies that the money lost from underpricing the shares is worth its weight in marketing and investor buzz from the opening day jump.)

Beatrice Nolan has more too on Sam Altman’s sit down with conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson. While Altman said a number of interesting things—most of which he has said before—the real news was the fact that Atlman felt the need to do Carlson’s podcast in the first place. Clearly OpenAI has seen reports that the MAGA crowd is unhappy with President Donald Trump’s cozy relationship with Silicon Valley’s biggest players and is hoping to win them over.

The MAGA wing of the Republican Party views AI companies with at best skepticism and at worst, downright disdain, seeing them as woke bastions of left wing coastal elitism, exemplars of Silicon Valley’s inordinate, insidious, and arbitrary power, and, in their quest to build AGI and “superintelligence,” guilty of a kind of idolatry (essentially trying to build God in a machine). You can watch Carlson press Altman on these points throughout the podcast, while Altman tries, often awkwardly, to parry the premise of Carlson’s questions, or assure Carlson that there’s really not as much ideological distance between them as Carlson seems to assume. It’s all slightly cringey (especially Carlson’s over-the-top facial expressions). But, despite the cringe factor, it is probably worth watching, if only to get a deeper sense of the reasons MAGA distrusts Silicon Valley in general and AI in particular.

Ok, now here’s more tech news.

—Jeremy Kahn

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.

Frost-Nixon meet Carlson-Altman

The pair also discussed OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, with Altman saying he now “feels differently” about the man he once saw as an “incredible hero.” Perhaps it’s because of the lawsuits, or the X spats.

In one tense moment, when the pair discussed OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji’s death, Altman asked if Carlson was accusing him of murder after the podcast host declared the death, which authorities have ruled as a suicide,“definitely murder.”

“I haven’t done too many interviews where I have been accused of murder,” Altman said.

—Beatrice Nolan

Larry Ellison’s brief stint as world’s richest man

Oracle’s revenue projections sent the stock, and Ellison’s net worth, soaring on Wednesday. It was bad news for old friend Elon Musk, though, whose nearly year-long reign as the world’s richest man came to a brief end. (Oracle stock pulled back a bit before the close, allowing Musk to regain the title.)

Oracle’s strong quarterly results added a whopping $101 billion to Ellison’s wealth at one point, boosting his fortune to $393 billion and leapfrogging above Musk’s $385 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. The staggering increase was the largest one-day increase ever recorded by the index.

Oracle stock surged 36% on Wednesday—the company’s biggest one-day increase ever—after executives reported blowout bookings and gave a bullish cloud outlook. The rally adds to the 45% gain the company already notched up this year. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that the majority of the new revenue will come from OpenAI, which signed a staggering $300B cloud agreement with Oracle. The AI firm will tap Oracle’s computing infrastructure under the billion dollar deal, which is one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed. The commitment far exceeds OpenAI’s current revenue. 

Oracle’s revenue projections shocked analysts, who told CNBC they were “blown away” and “all kind of in shock.” Some, however, are urging caution, warning the unprecedented success has made the stock overvalued. 

—Beatrice Nolan

What, you mean Teams isn’t as good as being there?

Microsoft is cracking down on its hybrid work policy.

The tech giant is mandating a minimum of three in-office days a week for employees beginning February 2026, according to a Business Insider report.

The policy will first apply to Seattle-area staff, later expanding nationwide and globally. Workers have until Sept. 19 to request exceptions. Microsoft rolled out a flexible work policy after offices reopened from pandemic closures where employees were permitted to work from home up to half the time without official approval. 

This move follows similar steps from Big Tech rivals including Meta and Google, which already enforce similar RTO rules. The stricter approach comes as the company increases pressure on employees, reshaping performance expectations in an effort to prepare for the next phase of AI-driven growth.

Staff in Microsoft’s AI division, led by DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, will face an even stricter requirement: four days a week on site starting January 2026, with exceptions only granted at the highest levels.

—Beatrice Nolan

Pop goes the Swedish fintech

Klarna climbed 15% in its Wednesday trading debut.

The Swedish-born fintech shares closed at $45.82, 15% above the $40 offer price. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski framed the listing as proof Klarna is moving beyond buy-now, pay-later into broader banking products, even if the company’s value has dropped well below its 2021 peak.

The closing price values the company at over $17 billion based on its outstanding shares, with stock options and warrants adding slightly to that figure. The company’s debut also made dozens of staffers millionaires, and its cofounders billionaires.

The listing arrives amid a resurgence in the IPO market, which has been under pressure, with companies including Figma debuting with strong performances. Klarna’s debut didn’t quite make the same splash as Figma’s in July, which saw the stock more than triple from its offer price. 

—Beatrice Nolan

More tech

—Meta and TikTok score a win against EU tech fees. But won’t receive any money back while officials reformulate the levy.

—Apple’s new AI guidelines are Trump-friendly. The company marked DEI as a “controversial” topic.

—Reddit removes subscriber counts from subreddits. The platform will switch to displaying weekly active visitors.

—Amazon-owned Zoox launches public service in Las Vegas. It’s limited to pick-ups and drop-offs at a select number of pre-approved locations.



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Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says company will be worth $1 trillion by doing these three things

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6 hours ago

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December 9, 2025

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Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.

In August, Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journalthat he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks toraise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had “a shot to be a trillion-dollar company.” At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a “trifecta” of growth areas to ignite the company’s next leg of growth.

The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “the same for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.

The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. “Over 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for “vibe coding”—rapidly building software with natural language commands—those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they’re defaulting to Databricks’ platform.

“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,” he said.

The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.

“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,” Ghodsi said, but “it’s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that’s inside enterprise.” He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing “many days’ worth of work down to minutes.”

And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakehouse and which are then powered by AI agents. “To get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakehouse, and with agents,” Ghodsi said. “Those are three new vectors for us.”

Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.

To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.

“There are huge advantages and pros and cons. That’s why we’re not super religious about it,” Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We will go public at some point. But to us, it’s not a really big deal.”

Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.



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New contract shows Palantir working on tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE

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7 hours ago

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December 9, 2025

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Palantir, the artificial intelligence and data analytics company, has quietly started working on a tech platform for a federal immigration agency that has referred dozens of individuals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.

The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But the contract is notable, nonetheless, as it marks the beginning of a new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, another agency of the Department of Homeland Security, since at least 2011. The description of the contract suggests that the “VOWS” platform may very well be focused on marriage fraud and related to USCIS’ recent stated effort to drill down on duplicity in applications for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.

USCIS has been outspoken about its recent collaboration with ICE. Over nine days in September, USCIS announced that it worked with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it called “Operation Twin Shield” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where immigration officials investigated potential cases of fraud in immigration benefit applications the agency had received. The agency reported that its officers referred 42 cases to ICE over the period. In a statement published to the USCIS website shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow said his agency was “declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud” and that it would “relentlessly pursue everyone involved in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and laws.” 

“Under President Trump, we will leave no stone unturned,” he said.

Earlier this year, USCIS rolled out updates to its policy requirements for marriage-based green cards, which have included more details of relationship evidence and stricter interview requirements.

While Palantir has always been a controversial company—and one that tends to lean into that reputation no less—the new contract with USCIS is likely to lead to more public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this year amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive tactics used by ICE to detain immigrants that have gone viral on social media. Not to mention, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this year to pilot a system that will track individuals who have elected to self-deport and help ICE with targeting and enforcement prioritization. There has been pushback from current and former employees of the company alike over contracts the company has with ICE and Israel.

In a recent interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Karp was asked on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from a moral standpoint, about families getting separated by ICE. “Of course I don’t like that, right? No one likes that. No American. This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded culture in the world,” Karp said. But he said he cared about two issues politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon view. On those two issues, this president has performed.”



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CoreWeave CEO: Despite see-sawing stock, IPO was ‘incredibly successful’ amid challenges of tariff timing

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December 9, 2025

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CoreWeave has been rocked by dizzying stock swings—with its stock currently trading 52% below its post-IPO high—and a frequent target of market commentators, but CEO Michael Intrator says the company’s move to the public markets has been “incredibly successful. And he takes the public’s mixed reaction in stride, given the novelty of CoreWeave’s “neocloud” business which competes with established cloud providers like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.

“When you introduce new models, introduce a new way of doing business, disrupt what has been a static environment, it’s going to take some people some time,” Intrator said Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco. But, he added, more people are beginning to understand the CoreWeave’s business model.

“We came out into one of the most challenging environments,” Intrator said of CoreWeave’s March IPO, which occurred very close to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. “In spite of the incredible headwinds, we’re able to launch a successful IPO.”

CoreWeave, which priced its IPO at $40 per share, has experienced frequent severe up-and-down price swings in the eight months since its public market debut. At its closing price of $90.66 on Tuesday, the stock remains well above its IPO price.

As Fortune reported last month, CoreWeave’s rapid rise has been fueled by an aggressive, debt-heavy strategy to stand up data centers at unprecedented speed for AI customers. And for now, the bet is still paying off. In its third-quarter results released in November, the company said its revenue backlog nearly doubled in a single quarter—to $55.6 billion from $30 billion—reflecting long-term commitments from marquee clients including Meta, OpenAI, and French AI startup Poolside. Both earnings and revenue came in ahead of Wall Street expectations.

But the numbers were not all celebratory. CoreWeave disclosed a further increase in the debt it has taken on to finance its expansion, and it revised its full-year revenue outlook downward—suggesting that, even with historic demand in the pipeline.

With media headlines calling CoreWeave a “ticking time bomb,” with critics calling out insider stock sales, circular financing accusations and an overreliance on Nvidia, Intrator was asked whether he felt CoreWeave was misunderstood.

“Look, we built a company that is challenging one of the most stable businesses that exist—that cloud business, these three massive players,” he said, referring to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  I feel like it’s incumbent on CoreWeave to introduce a new business model on how the cloud is going to be built and run. And that’s what we’re doing.” 

He repeatedly framed CoreWeave not as a GPU reseller or traditional data-center operator but as a company purpose-built from scratch to deliver high-performance, parallelized computing for AI workloads. That focus, he said, means designing proprietary software that orchestrates GPUs, building and colocating its own infrastructure, and moving “up the stack” through acquisitions such as Weights & Biases and OpenPipe.

Intrator also defended the company’s debt strategy, saying CoreWeave is effectively inventing a new financing model for AI infrastructure. He pointed to the company’s ability to repurpose power sources, rapidly deploy capacity, and finance large-scale clusters as proof it is solving problems incumbents never had to face.

“When I look back at history of the company, it took us a year with with a company investor like Fidelity, before they were like, ‘Oh, I get it,’” he said. “So look, we’ve been public for eight months. I couldn’t be prouder of what the company has accomplished.” 



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