Larry Ellison, the tech world’s great survivor

As Larry Ellison settled in for dinner at the elegant Japanese restaurant Nobu in Palo Alto last year, he was joined by his longtime friend Elon Musk. The pair had dined there together several times, but on this occasion, they sat across from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. The two billionaires shared an objective: get their hands on more of the Nvidia chips, known as GPUs, fueling the generative AI revolution.

“I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs: ‘Please take our money. No, no, take more of it,’” Ellison, co-founder of software company Oracle, later told an audience of financial analysts. “By the way, I got dinner . . . It went OK. It worked.”

The high-stakes networking speaks volumes about how Ellison, at the age 81, has clawed his way back to the top of the tech heap. A close friend and ally of Apple’s Steve Jobs during a previous tech era, he is now forging new personal alliances and navigating the industry’s often intense rivalries on the way to staking out a place in the vanguard of the AI revolution.

Ellison turned up earlier this year in the Oval Office alongside Sam Altman — a bitter enemy of Musk — for the unveiling of a mammoth AI infrastructure project, known as Stargate. This week, it emerged that OpenAI had moved ahead with that project by placing a $300bn order with Oracle, making it the centerpiece of a booming backlog of new business that has turned Ellison’s 48-year-old company into the hottest new AI property on Wall Street.

With Oracle’s shares soaring, his personal wealth exploded by more than $100bn this week, taking him past Musk to become, at least briefly, the world’s richest person, with a fortune of close to $400bn. Ellison’s personal reinvention as a power in AI has cemented his position as the tech world’s great survivor.

“He stands alone. There’s no one else like this, who has prospered in Silicon Valley for 50 years,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a former Ellison protégé. “Other people have passed on; he perseveres.”

The rise of a new generation of tech leaders this century had previously made it easy to write Ellison off as part of the sector’s past. His company’s database might have an important place in the guts of government and business IT systems but it hardly seemed central to tech’s future. Until recently, he had shunned the heavy investments needed to make Oracle a player in cloud computing — a business dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

But according to one person who worked closely with Ellison, he always paid attention to the technology transition. Other tech bosses may blaze a trail early in a new technology, but Ellison waits for a market to develop and “watches where the business is, where the money is flowing”. Being first isn’t what matters to him. “It’s about being the last man standing.” Now, with a late play that has caught a tailwind from AI, he may unexpectedly have put his company toe-to-toe with the giants of the cloud business.

The Larry Ellison who is steering Oracle’s AI-powered rise is a less contentious figure than the flamboyant character who flourished in the internet boom of the 1990s. Raised in Chicago by his adoptive relatives, he seemed to revel in his reputation as the bad boy of tech. From the accounting scandal that nearly wrecked Oracle in 1990 to its use of private detectives to dig into nemesis Bill Gates’ Microsoft, his company never seemed far from controversy.

If Oracle’s path has seemed smoother of late, it owes much of this to one of Silicon Valley’s great unsung partnerships. Safra Catz, a former banker and chief Ellison lieutenant, has in effect run the company since the late 1990s, according to one former staffer, though Ellison only formally gave up the CEO title in 2014. The arrangement has left Ellison freer to engage in high-level corporate strategy along with the kind of mega-rich pursuits that have made him the subject of media fascination, from twice winning the sailing world’s America’s Cup to buying nearly an island in Hawaii.

Catz’s closeness to Donald Trump — she was part of his presidential transition team in 2016 — may also have helped Ellison to maintain a convivial relationship with the president, despite his apparent disloyalty in backing other Republican candidates.

One mark of political favor was Oracle’s success at outmaneuvering its old enemy Microsoft to be selected as putative minority owner for TikTok’s US operations. That deal has yet to happen, though TikTok’s US service is run from Oracle’s data centers.

Ellison’s energy seems unabated. With wife Jolin he has been devoting much of his time recently to a new family, say people who know him. The couple have four young children.

He has also sought to refocus his long-running interests in medical and other scientific research, much of it into the diseases of ageing, with the new Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, UK.

Then there’s Hollywood. After backing daughter Megan’s venture into movie production, he is now supporting son David, who this summer took control of Paramount and is reported to be preparing a bid for Warner Bros Discovery.

Hollywood’s studio chiefs thought Larry Ellison “was just another rich person writing checks” to bankroll movies, says one people who worked closely with him. “Instead, he’s showing them how to run their business.”