Larry Ellison: Winning the database wars

10:23Zing Tsjeng:And importantly, the ability to access that information in a really handy way was going to be a really important thing.

10:31Simon Jack:So before the dawn of computer databases, you mean if you wanted to check out how many customers you had in, say, Mumbai or Massachusetts, you would have to go to literally a physical filing cabinet.

10:42Zing Tsjeng:You probably couldn't even find that out because your customs would probably have been filed alphabetically, not by region. These different bits of information would be very hard to extract. So this is why this is a big deal.

10:56Simon Jack:We're talking about the 70s, right? So Ampex's possible solution to the issue of storing and retrieving loads of information was to use videotape. But in time, they realised that the Ampex database wasn't working. In fact, it was described as something of a disaster.

11:12Zing Tsjeng:Larry knew this, and he would spend long lunches discussing the issues over games of chess or tennis with two colleagues, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. Ed Oates said, between tennis matches, Bob was writing code and implementing things, while Larry was mostly talking about becoming rich and famous, the normal Larry stuff.

11:28Simon Jack:Interesting insight into his personality there. Well, in 1977, Larry left Apex and was working at another tech company, but said, I could never really survive inside a conventional corporation. Around this time, he read a research paper by an IBM employee called Edgar F. Codd. That introduced something revolutionary called the relational model for databases. Larry could see its potential. It got around the many problems of the databases that were existing and taking around.

11:55Zing Tsjeng:Edgar Codd's paper had been written in 1970. And in the years since then, IBM, which at that time was the world's largest computer company, had been creating prototypes. And when Larry read the research, which IBM made public, he thought, if we were clever, we could take IBM's research, build the commercial system and beat IBM to the marketplace with this technology because we thought we could move faster than they could.

12:18Simon Jack:So Larry and his former Impact's colleagues, Bob and Ed, decided to form their own company, which they called Software Development Laboratories. They invested two grand of their own money, of which Larry contributed$1 ,200, over six grand a day. Larry got 60 % of the company, while Bob and Ed each got 20. And Larry got the majority because SDL was his baby. He pushed it through. And according to Ed, he had more chutzpah than the two of us combined.

12:43Zing Tsjeng:Larry said it was impossible to get investment. Software at the time was this vague notion. There was nothing tangible. We were persona non grata in the venture capital community, who were only interested at that time in hardware companies. But fortunately, software is not a capital-intensive business. You can do it all on a shoestring. You don't have to make stuff physically. It's code.

13:04Simon Jack:They initially started out as a consultancy business, winning individual contracts. And their first contract was with the CIA, designing a giant database, the kind that Impex had failed to do. Larry asked for$400 ,000, a lowball figure that almost lost them the bid, but they won it and got a 50 grand advance.

13:22Zing Tsjeng:In just a few months, Ed and their first employee, Bruce Scott, programmed their own database based on this relational model. And they named it, guess what? Oracle, borrowed from that earlier CIA project. And because the database was meant to be able to answer any question, it was coarse. The idea was that it was an oracle of wisdom.

13:41Simon Jack:But the contract money from the CIA took a long time to come in. According to Larry, we were running out of money. I couldn't make my mortgage payments. The co-founders realised that their business model of winning individual contracts meant that, as Bob put it, you're either working or you're trying to get work. Instead, they realised a better model for the business would be to just write and sell one programme over and over again.

14:04Zing Tsjeng:And sell it over again, exactly. In 1979, two years after founding the company, they released their database. Now, Oracle was the first commercially available relational database. I mean, you can have lots of different fields, like people from Mumbai, people who are over 50, people who've got three kids, all this different stuff. You can pull out these different bits of information at will. And they got it out first, beating IBM, despite using IBM's research, of course. And Larry believed customers wouldn't buy a product called version one. So he named it version two. That's really interesting.

14:36Zing Tsjeng:Suggesting their product had already been tested, revised and improved.

14:40Simon Jack:So he doesn't just have chutzpah. He's also got good marketing knowledge.

14:43Zing Tsjeng:I love that detail. Call it version two, even though it's version one. So people think, oh, the mistakes have already been made. They've debugged it.

14:51Simon Jack:It's a trusted product. Well, Larry was chief executive and also their salesman. And so steadily, the company grew as Larry sold Oracle to more and more companies across the US.

15:01Zing Tsjeng:Now, meanwhile, as this has been going on, Larry has got married to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins, a Stanford University student. but just two years later they divorced she sold her shares and the company backed him for just$500 I dread to think what those are worth now Nancy Wheeler if you're listening to

15:16Simon Jack:this don't kick yourself well in 1981 Larry started dating his receptionist Barbara Booth and a year later they had the first of two children together a son they called David we will hear more about David later sure will in 1983 Barbara and Larry got married but according to her a couple hours before the wedding Larry presented her with a prenuptial agreement a prenup that revealed the extent of his wealth. For this episode, we've drawn from Mike Wilson's biography, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison. God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison, a fantastic name for a biography. And when biographer Mike Wilson asked him about this, he said, I don't want to get into disputes between me and Barbara, which will affect the kids.

15:56Simon Jack:If that means I'm just not going to answer, defend this at all, then I'll have to live with that.

16:01Zing Tsjeng:According to the document, his salary was$130 ,000. He had a million dollars in property and almost the same again in cash and miscellaneous bits and pieces and most valuable, of course. He estimated his stock in his company to be worth over$10 million. So we can be sure that by 1983, Larry Ellison is a millionaire.

16:22Simon Jack:Barbara and Larry got divorced three years later. He's got a habit of this, as you will find out. But as with Ada, they remained good friends. In fact, Barbara says she found it hard to date anyone after him because they pale in comparison.

16:35Zing Tsjeng:Yes, I hope that Barbara's partner is not listening right now.

16:50Zing Tsjeng:OK, let's go from a million to a billion. The year Larry married Barbara, 1983, Larry renamed the company Oracle Corporation. Its growth skyrocketed when Larry decided to make their database portable, which means being compatible with every major computer operating system. Or as Larry put it, our policy is to be promiscuous. That's one way of putting it. And that makes obvious business sense, doesn't it? Because at that time, the architectures for computers were actually quite different. So he wanted to make something that would work on any hardware platform. And the business rationale for that is obvious.

17:24Simon Jack:Yeah, more customers, more money, more revenue. And it worked. Well, company sales doubled every year since they began. up to 55 million by 1986. And Oracle at this point was a big company. They had 450 employees. And so they decided to do the thing that successful companies do.

17:42Zing Tsjeng:You would have heard a lot of in this podcast. They did an IPO.

17:44Simon Jack:Yes, they went public on March the 12th, 1986. And by this point, Larry's stake was down to 34%. But after the successful IPO, that 34 % alone was worth$90 million.

17:57Zing Tsjeng:But they're not the only kids on the block at this time. The celebrations probably didn't last long because the very next day, Microsoft also went public, putting Bill Gates' stake in his company at$300 million. By the way, you can listen to our Bill Gates episode in the archive. Why would Larry care? Well, there's a quote attributed to Genghis Khan, among others, that Larry has repeated often to Oracle employees as well as in interviews. It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.

18:24Simon Jack:He's come a long way from that 22-year-old bumming around San Francisco.

18:28Zing Tsjeng:In his vintage T-bird. And it's very interesting. So the competitive streak about who's richest, who's got the best company, clear even at this early stage in the technology revolution.

18:38Simon Jack:Larry has discussed how he's inspired by Japanese business philosophy. One he describes as an aggressive pursuit of market share. This was, he said, absolutely our primary goal. Well, it makes sense because if you dominate the market, you dominate the share of investment, you dominate the kind of money you're making and also brand awareness. But at this point, several companies were trying to compete for dominance in the relational database market. And the competition was fierce. It became known as the database wars.

19:07Zing Tsjeng:Exciting. But Larry was ready for war. In his words, he pursued growth relentlessly. And he did this by building what the Washington Post described as one of the most aggressive sales forces in computing history. Sales are crucial. Companies will prioritize signing new customers for two reasons. And we see this in a lot of different businesses. One, switching costs. Once a customer has bought your software, switching costs money, time, effort, changing from one service to another. And two, customer lock in. They become dependent on a product, makes it difficult to leave. If something breaks, you've got to call them.

19:42Zing Tsjeng:I can tell you that I've seen mergers between companies fail because they can't translate the software or the operating system or their IT from one platform to another. Big mergers have collapsed because that is really difficult. So you get someone, you've often got them for life.

19:58Simon Jack:Yeah, if you've ever tried to switch electricity or gas suppliers, you'll understand what we're talking about.

20:02Zing Tsjeng:Well, that is considerably easier, I can tell you, than changing your enterprise software, the software that runs your entire organisation.

20:08Simon Jack:Well, a former Oracle sales rep said the management theory was simple. Go out and don't come back before you have a signed contract. And Oracle arguably didn't have the best product out there on the market. But Larry and his sales reps sold a vision of the company. In fact, they were known to sell customers technology that they didn't even actually have yet.

20:28Zing Tsjeng:Not unusual, I think, for salesmen, honestly. Anyway, his relentless pursuit of growth worked. Oracle doubled sales every year for over a decade. And by 1987, Oracle was the world's largest database management company. And he rewarded his team in flashy ways. He even paid sales bonuses in bags of gold coins.

20:45Simon Jack:Yeah, it kind of makes Google and Meta's free lunches and dinners pale in comparison. Bag of gold. Meta's coming home from work saying, how did it go?

20:52Zing Tsjeng:Pretty good. Here you go. Boom. Look at that.

20:54Simon Jack:Yeah. Hopefully, did it make a dent in the kitchen table? So in an oral history of that period, a vice president of sales at Oracle said, what happens is when you've got a lot of money at stake, you go right up to the edge to the line on the rules. And then you look at the money that's available and you start thinking, well, maybe it's OK to go over that line. In Larry's words, I knew eventually this, and he's talking about the very rapid growth year, would hit us. And when we hit the wall, we hit it very, very hard.

21:21Zing Tsjeng:In fact, in 1990, Oracle found itself on the brink of bankruptcy because an accounting scandal involving inflated sales. The sales team had been recording revenues before they actually got the money. And Oracle had hundreds of millions of dollars in uncollected bills from customers. Larry described it as a horrible, horrible mistake. I didn't know what I was doing.

21:41Simon Jack:Oracle was forced to restate previously reported earnings. Restating reported earnings.

21:46Zing Tsjeng:It's a massive no-no. No, basically it shakes all your important stakeholders' faith in the company. Your shareholders, they think, well, we can't believe the financial results.

21:55Simon Jack:We can't trust you.

21:56Zing Tsjeng:The banks who lend you the money, they say, hang on a second, we're lending you money on numbers you're giving us. If these numbers aren't right, should we lend you any more money? Usually, when you have to do that, somebody gets fired. Chief financial officer, CEO steps down, something bad happens as a result of that.

22:11Simon Jack:So he's lucky really to have survived the axe for everything that went down at Oracle at this point.

22:15Zing Tsjeng:Well, I think had he been, you know, the chief executive in someone else's company, he probably would have been fired. It's his company. So, you know, he does the firing rather than the firey.

22:25Simon Jack:Well, the company's stock value fell by 80%. He laid off 400 employees. That's 10 % of the workforce at the time. Shareholders actually brought lawsuits against Oracle and the SEC fined them$100 ,000. The cases were settled without Oracle or Larry admitting wrongdoing.

22:40Zing Tsjeng:and I remember seeing an interview with Larry Ellison he said this was the darkest time in his entire career and the way he puts it is that we were now a billion dollar company and I still had the same team for when we were a 10 million dollar company so it's a hundred times the size and what I realized was that the skill set you need from your team to run a billion dollar company is not the same as the skill set you need when you're a 10 million dollar company both are important skills but they're not the same and so he said i had to go to people that i'd started this company wouldn't fire them he said that it made him too depressed to leave his house i let everyone down but he also described it as a moment of clarity so he overhauled oracle's accounting policies he tightened financial controls brought in as i say more experienced senior executives and he said he was changing his own management style i used to practice what i jokingly referred to as management by ridicule people would be terrified to come into meetings at least he's honest about that.

23:38Simon Jack:Well, this was also a really big moment in Larry's personal life as well. He almost died. While surfing in Hawaii, he broke his neck and he punctured his own lung with a rib. And only months later, he had another accident while bike racing in Napa. My humerus bone, he said, basically exploded out through the arm. I mean, both these events and their locations, we have to say, point to the sort of lifestyle Larry enjoys. He loves adrenaline. He loves luxury but it led him in these two instances almost to death yeah it's funny how many of these

24:11Zing Tsjeng:go-getters do like this you know they're like heli skiing or hazardous high adrenaline sports it's i think it goes with some of the territory but then an interesting development in 1992 he hired a private investigator to find his biological mother florence she had no clue he'd become one of the richest men in america so he bought her a house and paid her daughter's college tuition and they stayed in touch until she died seven years later. So a strand wrapped up there in a way. I wonder what Florence made of it. Hey, mum, guess what? I'm one of the richest men in America. I'd love to have seen how that went down.

24:42Simon Jack:I mean, she probably had to have a sit down for a bit. So Larry Ellison has escaped death. He's reunited with his biological mother. But, you know, they say good things come in threes. And the 90s scandal, in his words, near corporate death, turned out to just be a blip. Oracle maintained its lead in the market. and in 1992, they released version 7 of the database. It worked really well. It proved incredibly popular. And so the next year, Forbes declared Larry a billionaire worth$1.6 billion at the age of 49.

25:29Larry Ellison:This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

26:06Zing Tsjeng:So let's go beyond a billion. And this wasn't the end of the database wars, which were really only just hotting up in the 90s. According to a senior vice president at Oracle at the time, it was the period of not just compete with, but eliminate the other competitors. And Larry's philosophy was very clear. You only compete with one company per year.

26:23Simon Jack:So one by one, they picked off their competitors, tracking rival sales teams, muscling in on their business. That same Oracle VP explained that when they turned their sights on the rival company InfoMix, It was such an amazingly focused effort. Within 12 months, Infomix was basically on the floor. Well, an executive at Infomix described Oracle as the evil empire.

26:44Zing Tsjeng:So it really is a kind of ruthless Darwinian struggle for supremacy in Larry's mind.

26:50Simon Jack:Right, yeah. And Oracle being like the Death Star turning the laser on the planet.

26:55Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, this period in the 1990s, and I can remember in California, I can't think of anyone I worked in tech who hadn't spent some time working at Oracle. It was kind of like the company. It was everywhere. And having worked at Oracle, you could pretty much go and work anywhere else. It was seen as a great starting place for lots of people. But one of their most formidable competitors, always becoming competitor in the space, was Microsoft, which brings us to Trashgate. Because in 2000, the media revealed that Oracle had secretly hired a private investigative firm to dig into pro-Microsoft groups.

27:26Zing Tsjeng:These are people who opposed the US government's antitrust case against Microsoft. Antitrust meaning that everyone was using Windows and that was seen as a monopoly at the time and people were saying, is that a healthy thing? And the prime investigators allegedly were offering Janice's money for the trash thrown out by Microsoft allies.

27:45Simon Jack:Oracle acknowledged hiring the firm, although not the specific allegations about digging around in the trash for money. Larry defended their actions. It is absolutely true that we set out to expose Microsoft's covert activities. If Microsoft is creating front organisations, as in those pro-Microsoft groups, I feel very good about bringing that information to the public. Microsoft said that Larry's admission was dramatic evidence that Microsoft's competitors have engaged in a massive and ongoing campaign to unfairly tarnish Microsoft's public image.

28:15Zing Tsjeng:But by the millennium, Oracle had essentially won the database wars. They'd also broadened into wider enterprise software, that means software for accounting, financial software, etc, etc. I remember this period, every single company was thinking, I've got to basically spend most of my investment on IT, Otherwise, I'm going to get left behind.

28:32Simon Jack:And it's funny because when we talk about big tech stories, we often think about the banner name companies, you know, like Google, Meta, Microsoft. But actually, there's a lot of money to be made in making software for businesses. A lot of software that you might never even have heard of unless you work in that specific industry.

28:48Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, if you're a chief technology officer or if you're an IT manager around this period, then Oracle would be a very big name to you. But probably not as a consumer. It wouldn't have been so clear.

28:57Simon Jack:So Oracle was the leading provider in a booming market. So it's perhaps not surprising then that in 2000, the Wall Street Journal identified Larry Ellison as the world's richest person. He was worth$50 billion. He'd just overtaken Bill Gates at$49.4 billion. He must have loved that. Helped along by the antitrust case against Microsoft.

29:18Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and it's worth noting at the end of that year, Forbes still listed Bill Gates as richer than Larry Ellison. Something Larry seemed quite miffed at. In an interview at the time, he told the Washington Post he was the richest person and that Forbes spots Bill as many billions as he needs.

29:32Simon Jack:So not a man to lose graciously, in other words.

29:34Zing Tsjeng:No, not at all.

29:35Simon Jack:Well, whether he was the richest or not, Larry was definitely spending that money. He bought a Soviet-made fighter jet, but the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms initially blocked its import because, according to Larry, they considered it a weapon. So instead, he bought an Italian Marchetti fighter jet.

29:50Zing Tsjeng:I'm sure the makers of this Italian fighter jet would be quite crushed that their efforts weren't considered a weapon.

29:55Simon Jack:Yeah, not quite up to the scratch of the Soviets, I'm afraid. Well, Larry actually sued the city of San Jose after he was cited for violating rules around night takeoffs and landings at their international airport. And he won the case so he could fly that Marchetti fighter jet wherever he wanted.

30:10Zing Tsjeng:And it's not just the jets. He's also a passionate yachtsman. He's invested very heavily in competitive sailing, even leading Team Oracle USA to multiple America's Cup victories. That's an expensive pastime. Ocean yacht racing, the America's Cup, cost millions, millions, millions. He was one of the highest paid executives in Silicon Valley, though, and it was revealed in 2006 he had access to a billion dollars in credit. So imagine having credit card with your limit of$1 billion. His accountant had told him to budget and plan because he was repeatedly pushing that credit limit to the max with his lifestyle.

30:41Simon Jack:If you're a billionaire and your accountant is worried, I mean, you must be spending quite a lot of money.

30:46Zing Tsjeng:Well, it's quite interesting, this idea. Do you think if you've got all that money, why do you need credit? And it's quite common, actually, because a lot of people's massive wealth will be, like an Elon Musk, for example, will be in the shares that they own in the companies. And they don't want to sell those every time they need some money. So what will generally happen is a bank will come along and say, you know, you've got$20 billion worth of shares. I'll give you a credit line of, let's say,$5 billion. So you have liquidity, so you don't have to cash in your chips all the time. So a lot of rich people use these kind of bank facilities.

31:17Zing Tsjeng:And banks like doing it because they charge them money and they think they're good for it.

31:19Simon Jack:Let's also take a moment to catch up on his romantic life. We've already discussed three marriages and he goes on to marry three more times. Let's go through them very quickly. Melanie Craft in 2003. Steve Jobs, his close friend, is their wedding photographer. 2015, marries Nikita Khan, 47 years his junior. and in 2024, now in his 80s, he marries Jolene Zhu, also 47 years younger. So he's got, let me just count them up, six, lucky number six.

31:47Zing Tsjeng:Jolene, we're rooting for you. Larry has a reputation as a playboy. One relationship even ended up in legal trouble. In 1993, a former Oracle executive assistant named Adeline Lee sued him, alleging she was fired after trying to break up her relationship with him. In the suit, she claimed that when she visited him at home to tell him, he pushed her onto a bed and attempted to force her to have sex with him or else.

32:10Simon Jack:Larry insisted she was fired for cause. He told the San Francisco examiner, that's just not true. She came over to my house an hour late. We were supposed to go to dinner in a movie. There was no time for us to have dinner. So I wanted to have sex. So we had sex. The thing was, she said she didn't want to have sex. She wanted to go to dinner. But finally, she said, OK, this apparently is where I forced her to have sex.

32:30Zing Tsjeng:Oracle denied her claims and settled the lawsuit for$100 ,000. But then Adeline Lee was later convicted of perjury and falsifying an email as evidence of Ellison directing her firing.

32:42Simon Jack:So Larry Ellison's private life, definitely not one without its own controversy. Well, what has Larry been up to for the last couple of decades in the business? So in the 2000s, Oracle made some big acquisitions of competitors, making it the largest enterprise software company. But his net worth has fluctuated with the dot-com crash and, of course, the global financial crisis.

33:03Zing Tsjeng:In 2014, after 37 years, Larry stepped down as Oracle CEO, becoming executive chairman and chief technology officer. I mean, there's quite a lot of backseat driving going on to this day, I'm pretty sure, at Oracle. Executive chairman means you're still in charge, basically. But that decade, the 10s, the 2010s, Oracle's growth actually stagnated because it was slow to recognise the importance of cloud computing. Cloud computing is where you store lots and lots of data, not in your own premises, but on servers which are remote, which a lot of companies now rent the space from somebody else, and that's the cloud.

33:40Zing Tsjeng:Anyway, Larry thought it was a passing fashion and publicly dismissed it as complete gibberish.

33:45Simon Jack:Oh, dear. Well, perhaps because they were slow to cloud computing, Oracle has recently bet big on the latest tech gold rush, AI. Oracle is becoming a major AI infrastructure provider. It's partnered with companies like OpenAI to run their models on Oracle's cloud infrastructure.

34:01Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, so basically providing some of the computing power. They've done a$300 billion deal with OpenAI over the next several years. And that AI boom sent Larry's net worth skyrocketing. And in September 2025, he became the second person ever to be worth more than$400 billion. and briefly, and it happened for like 24 hours, overtook Elon Musk as the world's richest person.

34:24Simon Jack:But there are questions. Some analysts worry AI could be another bubble. And a drop in Oracle stock in December has led investors to question whether Oracle's big spending on AI will actually pay off. But like many billionaires, Larry's diversified his investments. So he could potentially be making big money elsewhere.

34:43Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. Well, one good example is Oracle is one of a consortium of American companies who will take over control of TikTok from the Chinese company ByteDance. You may have read that in the news. There was a whole thing about we need to basically find an American owner for the American bits of TikTok. You can actually listen to our episode on Zhang Yiming for more of the TikTok story.

35:04Simon Jack:But now it's about time we reintroduce Larry's son, David. Now, if you hang out with film people at all, you'll know that the presence of very, very rich people, Often the sons and daughters of millionaires, billionaires is ever present in Hollywood. They're the people kind of financing things behind the scenes. And David has been described by journalist Marina Hyde as Kendall Ellison in reference to the eldest boy from Succession.

35:30Zing Tsjeng:The Kendall Roy character in Succession, which is a poison chalice, isn't it? Being the sort of, I say, you know, I wouldn't mind.

35:39Simon Jack:Wouldn't mind being the favourite number one.

35:41Zing Tsjeng:Give me that poison chalice, please. Anyway, in the mid-2000s, when David Ellison was just 23, he founded a film production company called Skydance. In 2009, David raised$350 million to finance a five-year partnership with Paramount to co-produce movies. And Larry, his dad, provided a big chunk of that. And over the next decade, Skydance grew into a very big, major media company producing blockbusters like Mission Impossible, Top Gun Maverick, a bunch of others.

36:09Simon Jack:So we get to 2024 and David, with that financial backing from his dad, Larry, along with other investors, bought Paramount's parent company National Amusements for$8 billion. The deal closed in August 2025 and Skydance was merged with Paramount.

36:24Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and this deal made David and Larry, of course, one of the most powerful duos in Hollywood. David became Paramount Skydance's chairman and CEO, overseeing more than 1 ,200 film titles, TV channels. They own things like MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, CBS News. But remember, it's Dad who controls the money and owns the equity. So this deal made Larry, now in his 80s, an incredibly powerful movie mogul as well.

36:49Simon Jack:And this story is still very much live. In late 2025, after Netflix had bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, the Ellisons put in 108.4 billion hostile bid to acquire Warner's.

37:02Zing Tsjeng:Now, a hostile bid is what you generally do if you want to take over a company is you go and talk to the board of directors of the company you want to buy and say, here's our offer. Don't you think it's great? And then the board of directors go to their shareholders and say, we, your board, recommend that you accept this deal. When it goes hostile is when the board say, we don't like this. Instead, what happens is the company that wants to buy goes straight to the shareholders and say, listen, your board don't know what they're doing. I'm offering you tons of money, ignore them and take my money and take this bid.

37:35Zing Tsjeng:That's a hostile take of a bid. And that's what's going on right now at the moment. There's an almighty tussle between Netflix and Skydance Paramount to buy Warner Brothers. Netflix is a streaming giant. And if they buy that, they'll also have HBO streaming. If Paramount Skydance buys it, the big five movie studios become the big four. Hollywood's up in arms about it. They'd rather actually Paramount buys it than Netflix because Paramount's a kind of movie studio that they kind of understand. It's a beast they recognise. But this deal is going on right now. It's very fractious. And there is a chance this deal doesn't happen at all because it's so complicated.

38:11Simon Jack:I mean, the hostile bid for now has been rejected even after Larry added a$40 billion personal financial guarantee.

38:18Zing Tsjeng:So, you know, watch this space. Well, that is where the Larry Ellison story, although he's still a hard charging, still got a wife who's 47 years younger than him.

38:27Simon Jack:Still got several fighter jets.

38:29Zing Tsjeng:I'm just trying to think how old. No, it's not worth thinking about. Don't calculate the age gap.

38:34Simon Jack:So we've discovered how Larry Ellison has made his billions. It's time to score him.

38:38Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. And we have at this point, for fun, we have a bunch of categories. Wealth, controversy, philanthropy, power and legacy. and we score our billionaires between zero and ten in this before asking you whether you think they're a good or bad or just another billionaire. So let us start with wealth.

38:55Simon Jack:Well, there's not that much money in between him, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg. Sometimes up there, sometimes around five. So, you know, he is up there.

39:04Zing Tsjeng:And he's been top of the tree twice in his career. Only briefly, though. Only briefly. But still, I think in that company, it's very hard not to give somebody a ten, isn't it? I mean, what, 9.9?

39:16Simon Jack:Well, I mean, even if he wasn't a 10, when we look at how he spends it, you know, he certainly has the champagne to supply the champagne taste now. He's got, just as a quick overview, property empire worth almost 2 billion. He owns, you know, as Alex, our listener, said in the early part of this intro, a Hawaiian island. He bought it for 238 million dollars in 2012. I mean, surely he's a 10.

39:39Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. And also, we also look at how far they've come. He wasn't born into wealth. He was adopted from an unmarried teenager. He lived in the south side of Chicago, not the swankiest postcode or neighbour zip code in the world. I'm going to give him a 10.

39:53Simon Jack:Yeah, he is a 10 out of 10. You are a 10, Larry.

39:55Zing Tsjeng:He'll like that.

39:56Simon Jack:I'm sure he will.

39:57Zing Tsjeng:In fact, he'd probably complain bitterly if we didn't give him a 10.

40:00Simon Jack:I wonder how he feels about not being the richest man.

40:03Zing Tsjeng:I mean, he probably thinks it's only a matter of time. We'll see.

40:05Simon Jack:Well, I like that Elon Musk has a bit of competition.

40:08Zing Tsjeng:Controversy.

40:09Simon Jack:No shortage of that, I would say. Just think about that business mantra. It's not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.

40:16Zing Tsjeng:There was Trashgate trying to help the efforts to sort of dethrone Microsoft. There was that big accounting scandal they had in 1990.

40:24Simon Jack:You know, he's got his checkered romantic past, his sexual relationships of employees.

40:29Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, Oracle is also heavily involved in defence, military surveillance. In fact, its very first contract was with the CIA.

40:35Simon Jack:I mean, there's just too much to go into here. But here's just one example. according to Associated Press, Oracle, among other US companies, has been part of designing and building China's surveillance state in the Xinjiang region, for instance. Police use Oracle to surveil the region's Uyghur Muslim population. Oracle has declined to comment to the Associated Press. But, you know, as we say, the company is up to its neck in defence, military and surveillance around the world.

41:01Zing Tsjeng:Those are, you know, controversial clients to have, I would say.

41:05Simon Jack:Also worth noting, he's donated to the Israeli military through the non-profit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. He gave the organization its biggest ever donation in 2017,$16.6 million. And that is a philanthropic contribution that has drawn its share of public attention.

41:22Zing Tsjeng:Look, I'm going to give him an eight.

41:24Simon Jack:Well, he's certainly a controversial figure as well. I mean, I just think back to what a rival executive said of Oracle, that it was like having the evil empire turning on you. so I think it's an 8 out of 10

41:36Zing Tsjeng:8 so we're both 8 on that one philanthropy how much of his vast wealth has he given is he going to give away he signed the giving pledge regular listeners will be aware of this something set up by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to give away most of your money in your lifetime he's pledged to donate 95 % of his wealth he's done some pretty traditional philanthropy too,$200 million to USC, University of Southern California for cancer research a billion to ageing and disease prevention through the Ellison Medical Foundation. He looks like someone who's not in a hurry to get old or trying to hold back that tide at any cost.

42:12Simon Jack:No, he says recently he's opting to give away wealth on his terms, mainly through the Ellison Institute of Technology. That's a for-profit philanthropic organisation at the University of Oxford. It aims to address issues like healthcare, food insecurity, climate change, AI.

42:28Zing Tsjeng:Well, each year Forbes assigns what they call a philanthropy score based on certain billionaires known charitable giving. For 2024, they found Larry had given away less than 1 % of his wealth, which puts him roughly on a par with Elon Musk. So I would say 1 % of wealth gets a 1 out of 10 from me.

42:47Simon Jack:Wow, I mean, less than 1 % of his wealth, really. I feel like for someone who is occasionally tied with Elon Musk for wealth, occasionally beating Elon Musk for wealth, giving away the same that Elon has, I've got to give him the same as I give Elon, which is zero.

43:02Zing Tsjeng:Okay. One from me, zero from you. Power and legacy. Wired, a tech magazine, an article in 2025 said, in Donald Trump's second term, one of the president's advisors described Larry as a literal shadow president of the United States. So that is a testament that he's pretty powerful and he's got lots of influence in many areas, business, government, of course, media, movies.

43:26Simon Jack:So he's come such a long way from just being that thunderbird driving semi-hippie in San Francisco. I mean, being called the shadow president of the United States.

43:37Zing Tsjeng:You know, he's one of those people who can pick up the phone and pretty much talk to anyone who wants to. So I would give him pretty high on this. In terms of power, I think legacy less so. He didn't really invent anything. Do you know what I mean? No, he was there at the right time. He unlocks the power of databases. He managed to snuff out the competition. I mean, I should say that there is a powerful European competitor to Oracle called SAP. that's probably the only other game in town on some of this stuff and it'll be interesting to see who harnesses AI best in the coming years for power I'm going to give him an 8

44:08Simon Jack:I would say for power he's an 8 for me but for legacy I mean if you went up to the average person on the street and you said hey what do you think of Larry Ellison they'd go Larry who I would give him an 8 for power and a 5 for legacy so what's the average of that 6.5 so I would say I'd give him a 7 in this category

44:26Zing Tsjeng:So is Larry Ellison good, bad or just another billionaire? What do you think? Email us at goodbadbillionaire, that's all one word, at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001 917 686 1176 and tell us what you think.

44:42Simon Jack:And don't forget to include your name as we may read out your message on a future episode.

44:46Zing Tsjeng:We got an email from John about our Elon Musk episode. He says, despite his faults, I think Elon Musk is a good billionaire. I'm probably biased because I have one of his Neuralink brain computer interfaces implanted into my motor cortex right now. Wow. All I can say, whatever your politics are, for me he didn't need to start this Neuralink project. He could have just sat there on some yacht in a beautiful country. But no, he chose to try and help people like me with a spinal cord injury or others with ALS. I absolutely love your show. Please keep going. John is the 18th person to receive an implant in the world and the fifth person to receive it in the United Kingdom.

45:25Simon Jack:Wow, talk about a trailblazer who emailed into us.

45:29Zing Tsjeng:Super thrilled you're getting in touch, John. Thank you for that. And keep in touch with us. I'd love to know how that is going, to be honest. So do keep in touch.

45:37Simon Jack:We've had a couple of listeners get in touch following our episode on Gymshark founder Ben Francis. Harris from London sent us a WhatsApp to say, I absolutely love your podcast and cannot get enough of it. Thank you, Harris. I re-listen to every episode as I find the stories captivating. I think Ben Francis is a good billionaire. He's created a successful private company at a time when the sports market was dominated by giants like Adidas, Nike and Puma. That's very true. And he could be credited with popularising sports influencing in the UK. Can't wait for the next episode. Keep up the amazing work.

46:10Simon Jack:Thank you, Harris.

46:11Zing Tsjeng:Thank you, Harris. Yeah. And Max from Ben Francis' hometown of Bromsgrove, WhatsAppped us to say, I played cricket with Ben Francis when we were kids. Let's just say he's better at sewing than he was at wicketkeeping.

46:23Simon Jack:Well, talk about being brought down to earth by an old childhood friend, Ben.

46:27Zing Tsjeng:Thank you very much indeed, Max.

46:32Zing Tsjeng:So who have we got next episode?

46:35Simon Jack:We have someone who's been called the king of Indian media.

46:38Zing Tsjeng:Basically changed the way that people in India consume TV from the early days of cable TV right through relationships with Rupert Murdoch and Disney and has had an enormous impact on the viewing habits of the world's most populous country.

46:53Simon Jack:But funnily enough, he started out in business selling toothbrushes.

46:57Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, his name is Ronnie Struvala and he is our next billionaire.

47:03Simon Jack:Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Hannah Hufford. The researcher is Hannah Ramazani. The editor is Paul Smith and it's a BBC Studios production. For the BBC World Service, the senior commissioning producers is Sarah Green and the commissioning editor is John Manel.

47:28Larry Ellison:I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's Upset Web, every week for my show, Merrin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists, and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.