The Journal. - How Larry Ellison (Briefly) Became the World's Richest Person

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

The Oracle co-founder is almost as wealthy as Elon Musk, and he’s in the middle of the AI revolution, the future of entertainment, and maybe even a deal for TikTok. WSJ’s Sebastian Herrera explains why, at 81 years old, Larry Ellison is more powerful than ever. Ryan Knuston hosts. Further Listening: Will Paramount Settle With Trump? Is the TikTok Saga Finally Over? Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lately, 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. Allison 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. OpenAI has signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle for cloud computing power.

After the announcement, stock spiked, briefly making Ellison the richest man in the world. But 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. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, September 18th. Coming up on the show, why Larry Ellison is suddenly everywhere. This episode is brought to you by Nespresso Professional. Designed to create meaningful moments of connection at work, Nespresso Professional delivers exceptional coffee every time.

With variety at your fingertips, you are sure to satisfy every taste. Discover the right solution. for your workplace today. Unforgettable coffee, meaningful connections. Nespresso professional. Visit nispresso.com slash pro to learn more. Sebastian, 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 ridden 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. I 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. I had 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.

He's somebody who sees himself as overcoming hardship. Yeah, he sees himself as an underdog. I think of it doesn't kill you and 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. They 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. For instance, he now owns almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he's 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 amiss from the hoop. Well, I mean, with all due respect to Mr. Ellison, he must not be that good of a basketball. 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. He'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 dog fights 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 dog fight with your son. That's a goal for me as a dad. But throughout the early odds, while Ellison was seemingly having a lot of fun, Oracle was growing stagnant. The 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. And 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 rode off as, you know, they've had their moment in the sun. They viewed Oracle as this 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. Oracle's future was up in the air. How it turned around is next.

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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 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.

That 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, X-AI, meta. The biggest news? The company had signed huge contracts with some key AI players, including that $300 billion deal with Open AI, 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. Oracle 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 that 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.

One 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. And on your inauguration, I'd like Larry to buy it, too. So Trump has shown a desire for Larry Ellison to purchase TikTok. And 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 counts, 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. And yes, this is the son he used to have mock dogfights with

and 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. Then, the father's 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 Warren's.

Warner Bros. 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 and dozens of television networks. We'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. That'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 Jin, Jessica Tuncle, Lauren Thomas, Tom Duton, and Joe Flint. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.