Larry Ellison Tops Billionaire List In AI Race: 8 Fun Info

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation (TORU YAMANAKA/AFP by way of Getty Images)

AFP by way of Getty Images

With data center spending hitting record highs amid the AI increase, it’s no marvel Larry Ellison, cofounder, chair and chief expertise officer of cloud big Oracle, is now rivaling Elon Musk for the title of World’s Richest Man.

The firm reported a 359% jump in order backlog throughout its first quarter 2026 earnings name, sending its inventory hovering 36% for the day. This landed Ellison, who owns greater than 40% of shares, on the prime of the Forbes Billionaires List, second solely to his good pal, Elon Musk.

For perspective, the web price of the seven wealthiest individuals within the world–all AI luminaries together with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang–exceeds $2 trillion, near the GDP of Canada.

Ellison, now 81, has been a billionaire since he was 47, however there are a variety of peculiar issues about him that make his rags to riches story iconically American.

1. Born into poverty

Ellison’s delivery mother was an unwed teenager in New York City throughout World War II who needed to give him up for adoption. His maternal aunt and uncle raised him in a poor neighborhood on the south facet of Chicago.

His father, a hard-working Russian immigrant and patriotic US bomber pilot, taught him to respect authority. But because the Sixties took maintain, Ellison dropped out of faculty twice to forge his personal path and comply with his ardour for laptop programming.

2. From CIA to Billionaire

He moved to Berkeley to code for a lot of tech corporations, and landed a job at Ampex the place he was placed on a workforce to construct a database referred to as “Oracle” for the CIA.

Inspired by the IBM analysis paper titled, “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” he and his colleagues left to type a startup to beat IBM to market in commercializing relational databases. They bootstrapped the corporate with $2,000 of their very own cash and landed a $50,000 contract from the CIA that seeded their startup. A number of years later they renamed the corporate Oracle with backing by Sequoia Capital. They went public in 1986, a day earlier than Microsoft, and in 1990 Ellison turned a billionaire.

3. Fun with Steve Jobs

Both as Silicon Valley tech titans and Woodside neighbors, Ellison and Steve Jobs have been good pals. Ellison has spoken extensively about their shut relationship, recalling how Jobs made him watch 73 totally different variations of Toy Story to get it proper. It was the primary full size function of Pixar, the animation studio which Jobs purchased from George Lucas for $10 million after being fired from Apple, and later offered to Disney for $7.4 billion in an all-stock transaction turning into Mickey Mouse’s largest shareholder.

Ellison even provided to purchase Apple to assist Jobs return after his ousting, however Job declined and determined to influence the board to take him again after he offered his NeXT working system to them. In 1997, Jobs was reinstated as CEO and Ellison joined Apple’s board.

4. Betting on AI

Following Jobs demise from pancreatic most cancers in 2011, Ellison doubled down on analysis establishing the Ellison Institute of Technology at USC with a $200 million reward in 2016 for most cancers therapy. More lately, he led the Series B spherical for Imagene AI which calls itself the OpenAI for precision oncology.

Although his predominant AI funding has all the time been Oracle, doubling his possession over time, Ellison has made different notable tech bets. In 1999, he seeded Salesforce and in 2018 invested in Tesla and took a board seat, later backing Musk to purchase Twitter. He was additionally an early investor within the now-defunct house testing startup Theranos.

5. Buying Hawaii

In 2012, Ellison purchased 98% of the island of Lanai from David Murdock, the CEO of Dole Food Company and proprietor of actual property holding firm, Castle & Cooke. According to Bloomberg, he paid $300 million for the land which included Four Seasons Lanai, the place he and Jobs had steadily vacationed collectively.

The resort now operates Ellison’s Sensei wellness retreat the place AI is used to offer personalised plans, ship insights, and customise remedies like thermal physique mapping therapeutic massage.

6. Buying Hollywood

In current years, Ellison has been on a tear buying Hollywood studios. He simply purchased Paramount Global for $8.4 billion as co-owner of his son’s Skydance Media, and has been reported to be getting ready a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, which now has a market cap of $40 billion.

Ellison’s son David is finest recognized for producing films within the Top Gun, Mission Impossible and Star Trek franchises, together with Top Gun: Maverick one of many highest grossing movies of all time, with a field workplace gross of $1.5 billion. His daughter Megan can also be an completed filmmaker with Annapurna Pictures which produced the Oscar-winning AI film, Her, together with different arthouse movies together with Phantom Thread, American Hustle and Vice.

Ellison and Musk had billionaire cameos in Iron Man 2.

7. Pledges to provide all of it away

A great pal of philanthropist Michael Milken who has raised billions of {dollars} for most cancers analysis, Ellison believes the street to bliss is altruistic giving. In 2010, he signed the Giving Pledge, a marketing campaign began by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage billionaires to donate at the very least half their fortune throughout their lifetime. Ellison pledged to provide away 95% of his wealth to advance scientific analysis and resolve complicated issues associated to well being and ageing.

Other billionaires who signed the pledge embody Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Mackenzie Scott, Michael Bloomberg, George Lucas and Ted Turner.

8. Immortality

Ellison appears to be like nearly as good now as he did a long time in the past when he first turned a billionaire. A tea-totaler pescatarian who works out every day, doesn’t drink alcohol or do medicine, and prioritizes sleep. He’s saved his thoughts sharp by leaning into his pursuits: crusing, tennis, flying, Japanese tradition, match chess, guitar, and by being in a relationship, even when it’s taken a half dozen marriages to perform this.

He says excessive achievers are pushed extra by worry of failure than the pursuit of success. When he was little, his biggest worry was dropping his adopted mother, and he prayed and made all types of offers to verify she’d return to him safely after she was late coming house from work one night time. When he misplaced her in faculty to a protracted battle with most cancers, he fell right into a deep despair and dropped out. He later discovered that the clever pursuit of happiness lies in giving with intention and has been donating his fortune to unravel for longevity ever since.

Hopefully with AI he’ll succeed and that may grow to be his biggest legacy.