From Database Empire to AI Dark Horse: How 81-Year-Old Larry Ellison Became the World's Richest Again

When Oracle’s stock price surged 40% in a single trading day on September 10, 2025, few expected the catalyst to reshape the entire wealth hierarchy. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and largest shareholder, watched his net worth spike to $393 billion—overtaking Elon Musk’s $385 billion and claiming the title of world’s richest person. But this wasn’t just a stock market victory; it was a late-game comeback that proved the old guard of Silicon Valley still has fight left.

The OpenAI Deal: Oracle’s Delayed Victory in the AI Era

The trigger was concrete: Oracle inked a five-year, $300 billion partnership with OpenAI, along with three other massive cloud contracts worth hundreds of billions. This single announcement crystallized what industry observers had been whispering for months—Oracle, long dismissed as a legacy software company, had successfully repositioned itself as critical AI infrastructure provider.

For years, the cloud computing race looked like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure’s game to lose. Oracle appeared outmaneuvered, stuck with aging database systems in a world obsessed with serverless computing. Yet the company held something neither AWS nor Azure could replicate at scale: decades-long relationships with enterprise customers and unmatched database technology.

Summer 2025 marked the inflection point. Oracle announced massive layoffs across traditional software and hardware divisions while simultaneously investing billions into data centers and AI infrastructure. It was a ruthless pivot—abandoning yesterday’s business to dominate tomorrow’s. The market rewarded the bet spectacularly.

The Man Behind the Machine

Understanding Ellison’s wealth explosion requires understanding Ellison himself. At 81, he’s operating with the hunger of someone still proving something to the world.

Born in 1944 to an unmarried 19-year-old mother in the Bronx, Ellison was adopted by relatives in Chicago. His childhood was working-class; his adoptive father held a government job while the family scraped by. He attended University of Illinois but dropped out after his adoptive mother’s death. Another stint at the University of Chicago lasted one semester. His formal education ended there.

What Ellison possessed instead was an instinct for talent and timing. As a programmer at Ampex Corporation in the early 1970s, he worked on a CIA database project code-named “Oracle.” When he left Ampex in 1977 with colleagues Bob Miner and Ed Oates, they invested just $2,000—Ellison contributed $1,200 of his own money—to launch Software Development Laboratories. They commercialized the database system and named the product Oracle.

By 1986, Oracle went public. Ellison wasn’t the inventor of relational databases, but he was the first to see their commercial potential and execute at scale. This pattern—identifying inflection points and moving decisively—would define his entire career. In 2025, at an age when most billionaires are transitioning to philanthropy, he executed the same playbook again.

The Ellison Dynasty: Tech and Hollywood

Wealth at Ellison’s scale extends beyond the individual. His son David Ellison acquired Paramount Global—the parent company of CBS and MTV—for $8 billion, with $6 billion funded from family resources. This represented a calculated expansion: father controls Silicon Valley’s database backbone; son controls Hollywood content distribution. Two generations, two industries, one empire.

Ellison’s political influence has grown proportionally with his wealth. A longtime Republican donor, he financed Marco Rubio’s 2015 presidential campaign and contributed $15 million to Tim Scott’s Super PAC in 2022. His January 2025 appearance at the White House alongside SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion AI data center initiative wasn’t ceremonial—it signaled Oracle’s central role in the nation’s AI infrastructure strategy.

The Life of a Contrarian: Discipline Meets Excess

Ellison embodies Silicon Valley’s fundamental contradiction: he owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, maintains a collection of world-class yachts, and commands palatial estates across California. Yet former executives describe a man who maintained a fanatical exercise regimen for decades, consuming only water and green tea while others indulged. This calculated self-discipline kept him looking, by some accounts, “20 years younger than his peers.”

His passions are outsized. A 1992 surfing accident nearly killed him—most people would quit the sport. Ellison doubled down. He became obsessed with sailing, backing the Oracle Team USA’s historic America’s Cup comeback in 2013. In 2018, he founded SailGP, attracting high-profile investors including Anne Hathaway and Kylian Mbappé. He revived the Indian Wells tennis tournament, rebranding it the “fifth Grand Slam.”

But Ellison’s personal life has been as tumultuous as his business ventures. Married four times before, he made headlines in 2024 by quietly marrying Jolin Zhu, a Chinese-American woman from Shenyang who is 47 years his junior. The marriage became public through a University of Michigan donation document mentioning “Larry Ellison and his wife, Jolin.” Social media observers noted the irony: Ellison, who loves surfing, dating, and seemingly everything else, had found time for another spouse at 81.

Giving on His Own Terms

In 2010, Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing 95% of his wealth to philanthropy. Unlike Gates or Buffett, however, he operates independently. He rarely collaborates with peer philanthropists, preferring solitude and uncompromised vision. His $200 million donation to USC in 2016 funded a cancer research center. More recently, he announced significant wealth transfers to the Ellison Institute of Technology—a joint venture with Oxford University—to tackle healthcare, food systems, and climate change.

His philanthropic philosophy is characteristically uncompromising: he designs the future according to his vision, not collective consensus.

The Comeback Generation

At 81, Larry Ellison finally claimed the title of world’s richest person. His journey reads like a Silicon Valley parable: orphan to dropout to empire builder to AI pioneer. He began with a CIA contract, built a database monopoly, and then recognized before most that the AI infrastructure wave would require the exact thing Oracle possessed—reliable, scalable data management at enterprise scale.

In an era where many assume the wealth pendulum swings toward the young and disruptive, Ellison proved that legacy tech platforms with strategic vision can execute comebacks. The richest person title may rotate again soon, but for now, Ellison stands as proof that the older generation of tech titans—armed with decades of industry knowledge and ruthless decision-making—remains formidable.

He’s Silicon Valley’s most stubborn survivor: combative, uncompromising, perpetually reinventing. His personal life may confound observers—the marriages, the extreme sports, the solitary philanthropy—but his business instincts remain sharp at 81. For the moment, the database king who became an AI infrastructure pioneer wears the world’s richest person crown.