How Larry built the fortune
Ellison's fortune is built on Oracle, the business software company he started with two colleagues in 1977. Unlike many founders, he has rarely sold large amounts of stock and has benefited from years of share buybacks, so his percentage of the company has grown over time. He now owns roughly two fifths of Oracle, which makes him by far its biggest shareholder.
Oracle first made its name selling relational database software, the kind of system that lets banks, airlines and governments store and query enormous amounts of structured data. Ellison pushed the company to ship products quickly and sell them aggressively, and by the 1990s Oracle's database had become a standard in corporate data centers. Recurring support and licensing fees from that installed base gave the company a steady flow of cash.
In the 2020s demand for computing power to train and run artificial intelligence models changed Oracle's profile. Its cloud infrastructure unit signed very large contracts with AI developers and took part in data center projects of unusual scale, and investor enthusiasm for those deals lifted the company's market value and Ellison's wealth with it.
Companies and holdings
Oracle grew through a long series of acquisitions under Ellison, including the business software makers PeopleSoft and Siebel, the hardware and Java owner Sun Microsystems, the cloud accounting provider NetSuite and the health records company Cerner. Today it sells databases, enterprise applications and cloud infrastructure.
Ellison's other notable holdings include:
- Most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, bought in 2012
- A major role in financing Paramount Skydance, formed in 2025 when Skydance, led by his son David, merged with Paramount
- The Indian Wells tennis tournament in California
- SailGP, an international sailing league he co-founded
He has also been a significant investor in Tesla, where he served on the board for several years.
His approach to acquisitions has been notably combative. The PeopleSoft deal took about 18 months of hostile bidding and court fights before the target's board agreed to sell, and Oracle's purchase of Sun gave it ownership of the Java programming language, which led to a decade of litigation with Google that the US Supreme Court finally decided in Google's favor in 2021.
Early life and career
Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born in New York City in August 1944 to an unmarried teenage mother. When he was an infant he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Chicago, who adopted him. He attended the University of Illinois and later the University of Chicago but left both without a degree.
In the 1960s he moved to California and worked as a programmer for several firms, including the electronics company Ampex, where he worked on a database project for a government client. Reading research by IBM scientist Edgar Codd on relational databases convinced him there was a commercial opportunity. In 1977 he founded Software Development Laboratories with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The company renamed itself after its main product, Oracle, and went public in 1986. Ellison was chief executive for 37 years before handing the role to others in 2014, when he became chairman and chief technology officer.
Philanthropy and public life
Ellison signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, promising to give most of his wealth to charity. For many years his largest gifts went to medical research through the Ellison Medical Foundation, which supported studies of aging and disease. His current focus is the Ellison Institute of Technology, a large research and teaching campus being built in Oxford, England, which aims to work on health, food security, climate and artificial intelligence.
He is also known for competitive sailing. Teams he funded won the America's Cup in 2010 and 2013. Ellison has supported various political candidates over the years and has close ties to several prominent technology and political figures, but he generally gives few interviews and prefers to speak through Oracle's results presentations. His son David runs Paramount Skydance, and his daughter Megan is a film producer whose company, Annapurna Pictures, has backed many award-winning films.