Larry Ellison is back on top, 48 years after he co-founded Oracle

By Stephen Nellis and Akash Sriram

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Fortune magazine wondered on its cover whether Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison might become the world’s richest person, while BusinessWeek declared Ellison is “cool again,” noting that “Silicon Valley’s bad boy is having his revenge.”

Both were published 25 years ago, but they could’ve run this week. The octogenarian Ellison is back in headlines after Oracle announced a clutch of cloud computing deals that rocked the tech world and sent its stock up 35.9%, putting Ellison’s fortune close to $400 billion, second globally only to Elon Musk.

Then on Thursday, news broke that Paramount, the media conglomerate Ellison’s family now controls, is preparing a bid to buy out the storied Warner Bros Discovery, threatening overnight to dominate Hollywood and culture.

The swashbuckling billionaire may have been known more for his yacht collection, his ownership of a Hawaiian island or his longstanding support of Donald Trump.

More recently, with little fanfare, he has plotted his way back to the center of power. At Paramount, his son David appears to be tilting CBS News toward the right, tapping Trump supporter and former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute Kenneth Weinstein as ombudsman for CBS News. He also is reportedly considering The Free Press’s Bari Weiss for a leadership role at the news organization.

Ellison has also got his hands on TikTok. In 2022, Oracle began providing U.S. tech infrastructure to the short video-sharing platform after national security questions arose over the Chinese-owned service used by over 170 million Americans.

Some probably have forgotten that Ellison’s brash tactics and lavish lifestyles earned him the role of bad boy of Silicon Valley since he co-founded Oracle in 1977.

In 2010, he played himself in “Iron Man 2.” Remarkably, Ellison has honed a reputation as an uber tech titan and playboy while tackling decidedly unsexy, vexingly hard computing challenges. Recently, he helped figure out how to string together thousands of computers to run artificial intelligence systems.

Massive, AI-level money was more elusive until the latest quarter, when the cloud deals juiced Oracle’s stock price.

Oracle vanquished database rivals in the 1990s, then missed nearly a decade of the sales and stock market gains from the wholesale shift of business applications to the cloud.

While AI shows tremendous promise for Oracle, success is far from certain, given that the entire industry is still working on a profitable business model. Also, Oracle has tied itself particularly closely to a single company — OpenAI, which, according to a person familiar with the matter, is committed to paying Oracle $300 billion for computing resources over five years.