Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder betting his fortune on AI and Hollywood

Larry Ellison

Photo: Oracle Corporate Communications / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 17, 1944 The Bronx
Occupation	Entrepreneur
Awards	Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement · Bay Area Business Hall of Fame

Larry Ellison has spent his working life selling things slightly before they exist. Oracle’s first database reached customers labelled version two; there had never been a version one. Half a century later the man who co-founded Oracle is running the same play at a scale nobody in Silicon Valley has tried, building data centres for artificial intelligence with borrowed money while underwriting his son’s Hollywood empire with his own pledged shares.

The appetite for risk has an origin story he rarely softens. His mother, Florence Spellman, gave him up at nine months, after a bout of pneumonia, to her aunt and uncle in Chicago. The boy grew up in the South Shore neighbourhood with a warm adoptive mother and an adoptive father, Louis Ellison, who had named himself after Ellis Island and whom Larry remembered as austere and unsupportive. He refused a bar mitzvah at thirteen and did not meet his birth mother again until he was forty-eight.

Ellison, whose birth in New York City is recorded on August 17, 1944, enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He left without sitting his second-year finals after his adoptive mother died. After a summer in California in 1966 he tried a single term of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago, where he first encountered computer design, then moved to Berkeley to work as a programmer, eventually at Ampex, where one of his projects was a database for the CIA code-named Oracle.

The idea that made him rich came from someone else’s paper. Edgar F. Codd at IBM had described the relational model of data, and IBM was slow to turn it into a product. In 1977 Ellison joined his former Ampex supervisor Bob Miner, along with Ed Oates and Bruce Scott, in Software Development Laboratories, putting in $1,200 of the company’s $2,000 in capital. The others were stronger engineers, so Ellison ran sales. The company became Relational Software in 1979 and took the name of its product in 1983.

The sales culture he built nearly sank it. By 1990 Oracle was booking the value of future licences in the current quarter, which inflated bonuses and revenue until the promised sales failed to arrive. The company laid off about a tenth of its staff, restated its earnings twice and settled class-action lawsuits from shareholders. A decade later an insider-trading suit over his sale of almost $1 billion in Oracle stock ended in 2005 with Ellison donating $100 million to his own foundation, without admitting wrongdoing. On Lānaʻi, the Hawaiian island he bought almost entirely in 2012, residents often both work for and rent from his companies, and Maui County had to warn his resort operator in 2022 not to block access to a public beach. The pattern critics see is consistent: Ellison treats limits as opening positions.

Oracle outlasted Sybase and Informix in the database wars of the 1990s, and Ellison joined Apple‘s board in 1997 at the invitation of his friend Steve Jobs, staying until 2002. The buying years followed, with Sun Microsystems in 2010 and NetSuite for $9.3 billion in 2016. In 2014 he handed the chief executive title to Mark Hurd and Safra Catz and became executive chairman and chief technology officer, the roles he still holds.

The money also went to water and courts. His BMW Oracle Racing yacht won the America’s Cup in 2010; in 2013 Oracle Team USA came back from 1-8 down against Emirates Team New Zealand to win 9-8 on San Francisco Bay, a defence played out after the team was docked two points because some members had cheated in warm-up events. He bought the Indian Wells tournament in 2009 and co-founded SailGP with Russell Coutts in 2019.

Artificial intelligence turned a database company into a bet on electricity and concrete. In January 2025 Ellison stood at the White House with Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son to announce the Stargate Project. On September 10 that year Oracle reported $455 billion in contracted future revenue, against roughly $180 billion expected by analysts, and its shares jumped about 36 percent, their best day since 1992. For a few hours Bloomberg’s index ranked Ellison the richest person in the world. Days later Oracle named Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia co-chief executives, and in January 2026 it took a 15 percent stake in the joint venture created to run TikTok‘s American business.

Hollywood is the other half of the wager. His family trust financed the merger of Paramount with Skydance, the studio run by his son David Ellison, in August 2025. When Warner Bros. Discovery chose a deal with Netflix, Larry Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion of equity behind Paramount’s hostile counter-offer. Nine offers later, on October 6, 2026, the takeover closed and the combined company took the name Skydance. Settling a lawsuit from state attorneys general cost an editorial-independence board for CNN and a promise of $1.5 billion in extra film spending over five years. Bloomberg estimated the Ellisons put in about $17 billion. His daughter, Megan Ellison, founded Annapurna Pictures; he himself turned up in a cameo in Iron Man 2 and was played by Hart Bochner in The Dropout, as one of the early investors in Theranos.

The bill is now visible. In October The Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison had pledged Tesla and SpaceX shares to borrow more from banks, and Oracle’s proxy shows 413 million of his Oracle shares pledged for personal loans, about 36 percent of his stake. On November 2 Oracle filed to raise $20 billion in new stock and bonds for its data-centre buildout, after a fiscal year in which its free cash flow was negative $23.7 billion. Three days later a further slide pushed Ellison out of the Forbes top ten, and Skydance shares were trading about 41 percent below their $12 issue price.

Away from the markets he keeps an ascetic discipline, saying he avoids alcohol and drugs because he cannot stand anything that clouds his mind. He is married to Jolin Zhu, a University of Michigan graduate, a union that became public in 2024. His philanthropy runs mainly through the Ellison Institute of Technology, which grew out of a $200 million gift to the University of Southern California and opened a campus in Oxford in 2023.

At 82, Ellison still holds the chairman’s seat and the technology portfolio at Oracle, and the company has told investors that its capital spending will peak this fiscal year and the next. Whether the AI contracts convert into cash before the debt comes due is the question his fortune now hangs on, and it is the same bet he made with version two.

Tags: artificial intelligence, business, ceos, David Ellison, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Skydance, Oracle, entrepreneurs, Larry Ellison

Related People

Related People

Discussion