In a stunning shift at the apex of global wealth, Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison has become the world’s richest person. A massive surge in Oracle’s stock price, driven by revenue predictions from its burgeoning cloud and AI infrastructure business, propelled Ellison past the usual names of Musk, Arnault, and Bezos. The ascent marks the pinnacle of a career defined by relentless ambition, prescient technological bets, and a personality as legendary as the company he built.
From a college dropout to the helmsman of a software titan, Ellison’s journey is a quintessential Silicon Valley saga, albeit one with a uniquely flamboyant edge.
From South Side Chicago to Silicon Valley
Ellison’s beginnings were a world away from the lavish lifestyle he is now known for. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1944 to a single teenage mother, he was adopted by his great-aunt and great-uncle and raised in a middle-class Jewish household on the South Side of Chicago.
He was a bright but unfocused student. He left the University of Illinois at the end of his second year and later attended the University of Chicago for a single term. In 1966, at the age of 22, he packed his belongings and drove to Berkeley, California, with a dream of reinventing himself. He arrived at the dawn of the tech revolution with little money but an innate grasp of computer programming.
The Genesis of a Database Empire
After a series of programming jobs, Ellison landed at Ampex Corporation. It was there that he encountered a seminal 1970 paper by IBM computer scientist Edgar F. Codd titled “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.” While giants like IBM failed to see the commercial potential, Ellison saw the future. The paper described a new way of organizing and accessing data in what would become known as a relational database.
In 1977, with $1,200 of his own money, Ellison, along with partners Bob Miner and Ed Oates, founded Software Development Laboratories. Their first major breakthrough was winning a contract to build a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CIA; the project’s codename was Oracle.
They decided to build their product to be compatible with IBM’s System R database, correctly gambling that customers would prefer a product that worked on non-IBM hardware. They renamed the company Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982 and went public in 1986, just one day before Microsoft.
Building the Behemoth
Ellison cultivated an aggressive, “take-no-prisoners” sales culture that became legendary in the industry. Oracle’s early success was nearly its undoing. In 1990, the company faced a brush with bankruptcy after it was discovered its salespeople were booking revenue for future sales in the current quarter to inflate their numbers.
Ellison called it “an incredible business mistake” and orchestrated a massive turnaround. He rebuilt the management team, overhauled business practices, and released a much more stable version of the database software, Oracle 7, in 1992. This release cemented Oracle’s dominance in the database market for decades.
His next masterstroke was recognizing that the future was in enterprise applications. He went on an acquisition spree, executing famously ruthless takeovers of rivals like PeopleSoft and Sun Microsystems, which gave Oracle ownership of the valuable Java programming language and hardware systems.
More recently, as the tech world shifted to the cloud, many counted Oracle out. Yet, Ellison pivoted the company to focus on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), directly challenging giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It is this successful, and once improbable, pivot that has fueled the stock surge making him the world’s richest man. The insatiable demand for computing power to train artificial intelligence models has sent companies flocking to OCI, vindicating Ellison’s multi-billion-dollar bet.
A Larger-Than-Life Persona yachtsman, pilot, and island owner
Beyond the boardroom, Ellison is known for a lifestyle as expansive as his ambition. A passionate yachtsman, he founded Oracle Team USA and has won the prestigious America’s Cup multiple times. His real estate property portfolio is also legendary. Most notably, in 2012, he purchased 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he is developing into a wellness and sustainability paradise. A licensed pilot, Ellison owns a fleet of aircraft, including several private jets and even a decommissioned Italian fighter jet. Married and divorced four times, Ellison has two children, David and Megan, who are both highly successful film producers. He was also a very close friend of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Despite his immense wealth, his focus remains locked on competition. His story is that of a defiant outsider who, through sheer force of will and a keen eye for the next technological wave, outmaneuvered his rivals to build an empire and, finally, claim the title of the world’s richest man.