With data center spending hitting record highs amid the AI boom, it’s no wonder Larry Ellison, cofounder, chair and chief technology officer of cloud giant Oracle, is now rivaling Elon Musk for the title of World’s Richest Man.
The company reported a 359% jump in order backlog during its first quarter 2026 earnings call, sending its stock soaring 36% for the day. This landed Ellison, who owns more than 40% of shares, at the top of the Forbes Billionaires List, second only to his good friend, Elon Musk.
For perspective, the net worth of the seven wealthiest people in the world–all AI luminaries including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin–exceeds $2 trillion, close to the GDP of Canada.
Ellison, now 81, has been a billionaire since he was 47, but there are a number of surprising things about him that make his story iconically American.
1. From rags to riches
He was born to an unwed teenager in New York City during 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 side of Chicago.
His father, a hard-working Russian immigrant and patriotic US bomber pilot, taught him to respect authority. But as the 1960s took hold, Ellison dropped out of college twice to forge his own path and follow his passion for computer programming.
2. CIA seeded his start
He moved to Berkeley to code for a number of tech companies, and landed a job at Ampex where he was put on a team to build a database called “Oracle” for the CIA.
Inspired by the IBM research paper titled, “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” he and his colleagues left to form a startup to beat IBM to market in commercializing relational databases. They bootstrapped the company with $2,000 of their own money and landed a $50,000 contract from the CIA that seeded their startup. A few years later they renamed the company Oracle with backing by Sequoia Capital. They went public in 1986, a day before Microsoft, and in 1990 Ellison became a billionaire.
3. Fun with Steve Jobs
Both as Silicon Valley tech titans and Woodside neighbors, Ellison and Steve Jobs were good friends. Ellison has spoken extensively about their close relationship, recalling how Jobs made him watch 73 different versions of Toy Story to get it right. It was the first full length feature of Pixar, the animation studio which Jobs bought from George Lucas for $10 million after being fired from Apple, and later sold to Disney for $7.4 billion in an all-stock transaction becoming Disney’s largest shareholder at the time.
Ellison even offered to buy Apple to help Jobs return after his ousting, but Jobs declined and decided to persuade the board to take him back after selling them his NeXT operating system. In 1997, Jobs was reinstated as CEO and Ellison joined Apple’s board.
4. Betting on AI
Following Jobs death from pancreatic cancer in 2011, Ellison stepped up funding for disease research and established the Ellison Institute of Technology at USC with a $200 million gift in 2016. More recently, he led the Series B round for Imagene AI, a precision oncology startup.
Although his main AI investment has always been Oracle, doubling his ownership over time, Ellison has made other notable tech bets. In 1999 he seeded Salesforce and in 2018 invested in Tesla, taking a board seat and later backing Musk to buy Twitter. He was also an early investor in the now-defunct health testing startup Theranos.
5. Buying up Hawaii
In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of the island of Lanai from David Murdock, the CEO of Dole Food Company and owner of real estate holding company, Castle & Cooke. According to Bloomberg, he paid $300 million for the land which included Four Seasons Lanai, where he and Jobs had frequently vacationed together.
The resort now operates Ellison’s Sensei wellness retreat where AI is used to provide personalized plans, deliver insights, and customize treatments like thermal body mapping massages.
6. Buying up Hollywood
In recent years, Ellison has also been on a tear acquiring Hollywood studios. He recently closed on a deal to buy Paramount Global for $8.4 billion as co-owner of his son’s Skydance Media, and has been reported to be preparing a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery.
Ellison’s son David is best known for producing movies in the Top Gun, Mission Impossible and Star Trek franchises, including Top Gun: Maverick one of the highest grossing films of all time, with a box office gross of $1.5 billion. His daughter Megan is also an accomplished filmmaker with Annapurna Pictures which produced the Oscar-winning AI movie, Her, along with arthouse films Phantom Thread, American Hustle and Vice.
As for his own film credits, Ellison had a cameo alongside Musk in Iron Man 2.
7. Giving it all away
A good friend of philanthropist Michael Milken who has raised billions of dollars for cancer research, Ellison believes the road to bliss is altruistic giving. In 2010, he signed the Giving Pledge, a campaign started by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage billionaires to donate at least half their fortune during their lifetime. Ellison pledged to give away 95% of his wealth to advance scientific research and solve complex problems related to health and aging.
Other billionaires who signed the pledge include Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Mackenzie Scott, Michael Bloomberg, George Lucas and Ted Turner.
8. Immortality
Ellison looks as good now as he did decades ago when he first became a billionaire. A tea-totaler pescatarian who works out daily, doesn’t drink alcohol or do drugs, and prioritizes sleep. He’s kept his mind sharp by leaning into his interests: sailing, tennis, flying, Japanese culture, tournament chess, guitar, and by being in a relationship, even if it’s taken a half dozen marriages to accomplish this.
He says high achievers are driven more by fear of failure than the pursuit of success. When he was little, his greatest fear was losing his adopted mom, and he prayed and made all sorts of deals to ensure she’d return to him safely after she was late coming home from work one night. When he lost her in college to a long battle with cancer, he fell into a deep depression and dropped out. He later discovered that the intelligent pursuit of happiness is in giving with intention and has been donating his fortune to solve for longevity ever since. Hopefully with AI he’ll succeed and that will become his greatest legacy.
