How Larry Ellison (Briefly) Became the World's Richest Person

0:05Lately, there's one man whose name is seemingly everywhere. Larry Ellison is now the richest person in the world. It's going to come from Larry Ellison. Ellison adding over$100 billion to his net worth. Larry Ellison. He's the 81-year-old founder of the software company Oracle. And though he's been known around Silicon Valley for decades, he's not what you'd call a household name. A lot of people forgot about Larry Ellison, and that's just because Oracle, his company, hasn't really been very relevant until recently. Our colleague Sebastian Herrera covers the tech industry. And he says that now, Oracle is very relevant, especially after the company announced last week that it had signed a bunch of massive AI deals.

0:52OpenAI has signed a$300 billion deal with Oracle for cloud computing power. After the announcement, the company's stock spiked, briefly making Ellison the richest man in the world.

1:07But that's not the only thing he's been up to. Ellison also recently became a big Hollywood player after he helped finance the purchase of the entertainment conglomerate Paramount. On top of all that, he's also been getting into the social media game. Oracle is finalizing a deal to become one of the new owners of TikTok's U.S. business. Yeah, Larry Ellison really is the man of the hour in many ways. He's still involved in so much and has his hands in so many different parts of our lives, whether it's through media, through politics, through technology. And it doesn't look like he's going to stop anytime soon.

1:46Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, September 18th.

1:59Coming up on the show, why Larry Ellison is suddenly everywhere.

2:18Sebastian, what do you find most interesting about Larry Ellison? I think what interests me with him is that even though he's had this really long career and some people have written him off, he seems to come back time and time again. And he's been quoted as saying that he loves to win, that it really drives him. And he's certainly winning in a lot of ways right now. Here's Ellison in a 2013 interview with the broadcaster Charlie Rose. Someone said to me that I asked him to describe you. And they said, Larry likes to win. I think I do. I do like to win. Well, let me say I like to compete. And I like to discover my own limits.

2:59I like to test my own limits. Ellison has a long history of winning, but his path to success wasn't always an easy one. So Larry Ellison has much more humble beginnings than the average tech entrepreneur. His mother was 19 years old when she birthed him, and she actually gave him up for adoption. And he was raised by his aunt and uncle on the south side of Chicago, and he never knew his biological father. He's been quoted as saying that he had all the disadvantages necessary for success. All the disadvantages necessary for success. You know, when you're raised on the south side of Chicago, you probably want to move someplace nicer.

3:43He's somebody who sees himself as overcoming hardship. Yeah, he sees himself as an underdog. I think if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. So I've always been very ambitious. I've always been very curious. After dropping out of college twice, Ellison moved to Berkeley, California in 1966. There, he started getting into computer programming. And soon, he landed a job working on a database project for the CIA. A CIA project called Oracle. By the time 1977 came around, and he created Oracle, he liked that name enough from his old project to use it. Ellison's Oracle was kind of a boring company.

4:28They built the software that other companies used to organize their data. Some of our older listeners may remember those big server racks that used to live inside offices to store data. The software on those machines was Oracle's bread and butter. This technology was huge in the 80s and 90s. And when Oracle went public in 1986, business was booming. And so by the early 90s, the company was doing well enough that Ellison joined the Forbes list of billionaires. His company might be a little boring, but Ellison is anything but. Among the world's billionaire elite, he's been seen as quite the character.

5:11For instance, he now owns almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he set up a holistic wellness center. He's been divorced four times, And he's got a sailing team that won the America's Cup tournament twice, which if you're into sailing is a very big deal. He was even a crew member in one of the winning races. And I'm especially proud to bring the America's Cup once again, after a long absence, back to the United States of America. But also, he loves other sports, so he famously, on his mega yacht, has a basketball hoop installed. and he actually has a boat that chases the mega yacht that retrieves balls when they go and miss from the hoop.

5:55Well, I mean, with all due respect to Mr. Ellison, he must not be that good of a basketball player if his shots are bouncing off and going into the ocean. Right, I don't think he claims to be Steph Curry, but the fact that he has that is pretty amazing.

6:12He's also reportedly almost died twice while out on the water, once while body surfing, and another time when a storm hit his yacht during a race. And he's a pilot. According to the Guardian newspaper, he has owned two fighter-style jets and used to square off against his son in mock dogfights over the Pacific Ocean. He has all these stories that just make him a really interesting person. I mean, what a life to, for fun, be able to go on a fighter jet and just play around in a mock dogfight with your son. That's a goal for me as a dad. But throughout the early aughts, while Ellison was seemingly having a lot of fun, Oracle was growing stagnant.

6:56The company stayed focused on its database software, while its competitors like Amazon and Microsoft were getting into the cloud. Oracle really relied on the database technology for a long time and didn't really turn into the cloud computing until late in the game. And Larry Ellison was sort of down about the cloud early on. At an Oracle event in 2008, Ellison compared cloud computing to a fleeting fashion trend. He said, quote, Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? Oracle was missing the boat.

7:35And as a result, the company was starting to get a bad reputation around the Silicon Valley tech community. Oracle, you know, frankly, throughout the 2010s, very few people were mentioning Oracle aside from just this clunky technology company that had been around for a while that people sort of wrote off as, you know, they've had their moment in the sun. They viewed Oracle as a has-been company that was popular in the 80s and 90s, but that really had had its moment and was not a main technology player, not really paying off for investors. and I think there was a lot of angst of what Oracle's next beat would be.

8:15Oracle's future was up in the air. How it turned around is next.

8:33Eventually, Larry Ellison realized that cloud computing was the future and jumped on the bandwagon. But Oracle was way behind their competition in market share. But that delay turned out to be an advantage in the long run. Because by the time Oracle started investing heavily in the cloud in the mid-2010s, it could see more clearly where the technology was headed. By the time AI came around and AI training came around, they had focused a lot of their cloud computing offerings for this AI boom. So by the time the AI boom came, they were in a really great position to capitalize on it. And so in some ways, their slowness with getting on the cloud computing wave, the first iteration of it, ended up paying off because when they refocused, they refocused to the right thing.

9:25That made Oracle's data centers the perfect option for AI companies, including OpenAI. Also, Oracle isn't building its own AI model. So unlike Amazon and Microsoft, it's been seen as a neutral, trusted partner for AI cloud computing. And that really paid off last Tuesday. Last week I was sitting at my computer and I was hearing the earnings call for Oracle. Thanks, Ken, and good afternoon, everyone. And going into that day, nobody expected to see and hear what Oracle revealed. We had an amazing start to the year because Oracle has become the go-to place for AI workloads. We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who's who of AI, including OpenAI, XAI, Meta…

10:20The biggest news? The company had signed huge contracts with some key AI players, including that$300 billion dollar deal with OpenAI, which is one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed. And that set their stock skyrocketing. Their stock hadn't seen a day like that since 1992. Analysts and investors that were on Oracle's earnings call that day, they were just dumbfounded. Listen, even I'm sort of blown away by what this looks like going forward. I think we're all kind of in shock in a very, very good way. They couldn't believe how good this report had been, and it really was a marker day for Oracle.

11:01Oracle was officially back. The company's stock is up more than 100 % this year. And after the stock went up even more following last week's news, Ellison's wealth rose by$89 billion. Ellison owns roughly 40 % of Oracle's stock. And for a day, he was the world's richest person. Though his friend Elon Musk quickly reclaimed the title. One of the big things with Larry Ellison is that he has relationships with just about everybody in the tech world. And so as Oracle has updated their technology, behind the scenes, they've also played politics. And you've seen them sort of turn everything around through those two things.

11:48One of the key people that Ellison has created a relationship with is President Donald Trump. And Trump has become a fan of Ellison, too, especially when it comes to the debate over TikTok's Chinese ownership. In January, Larry Ellison was at the White House, and somebody asked President Trump at this press conference if he wanted Elon Musk to buy TikTok, and he said, yeah, but also it would be great if Larry Ellison bought it as well. Are you open to Elon buying TikTok? I would be if he wanted to buy it, yeah. I'd like Larry to buy it, too. So Trump has shown a desire for Larry Ellison to purchase TikTok.

12:32And even as Donald Trump has sought to sell TikTok to U.S. investors, he's seen Larry Ellison as someone who can really step up and help him with that. And that, by all accounts, is what's happening. And this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that a framework of a deal has been reached for an American consortium led by Oracle to own 80 % of a new U.S. version of TikTok. A senior White House official said, quote, any details of the TikTok framework are pure speculation unless they are announced by this administration. Ellison has also been making moves outside the tech world. Earlier this year, he used his wealth to help finance his son David's takeover of Paramount Global.

13:14And yes, this is the son he used to have mock dogfights with in their fighter jets. In addition to a movie studio, Paramount also owns networks like Nickelodeon and CBS. When his son, David Ellison, became the head of Paramount Skydance, Trump was very happy about it. He called David Ellison a great man. CBS was just sold to a great person that I know very well. A great man, actually. After acquiring the company, David Ellison was quick to install a Trump ally, CBS's new ombudsman. So Trump has shown that he's very happy that Larry Ellison and his son David are as involved in media and in this potential TikTok deal as they have been.

14:04Then, the father-son duo showed that they weren't done yet. Paramount Skydance is now preparing to submit a bid to buy another huge media conglomerate, again with dad's money. The Ellison family is bankrolling a potential purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery, which would be one of the biggest deals in the entertainment industry. It would change the entertainment industry. And if they're able to pull that deal off, they will own a huge part of Hollywood. A merger between Paramount Global and Warner Brothers Discovery would bring together two large movie studios, Paramount and Warner Brothers, two popular streaming services, HBO and Paramount Plus, two huge news outlets, CBS and CNN, and dozens of television networks.

14:52We're probably going to continue to talk plenty about Larry Ellison going forward. But Ellison is again 81 years old. He's not going to be around forever, although he's trying. Larry Ellison has vested hundreds of millions of dollars into health research and into the idea of living as long as you can. He's talked about death as something that doesn't really make sense to him. So this is someone who has shown that he has no plans to just ride into the sunset. He wants to stick around. He wants to be relevant. He wants to be a part of this game as long as he can. And he's certainly doing that.

15:47That's all for today. Thursday, September 18th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Berber Gin, Jessica Tunkel, Lauren Thomas, Tom Dotton, and Joe Flint.

16:08Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.