← Good Bad Billionaire
Good Bad Billionaire
Larry Ellison: Winning the database wars
00:46:10
Larry Ellison is one of Silicon Valley’s most combative and controversial billionaires
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- [00:00]
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- [01:24]
Zing Singh
It's 1996. A balmy Californian coast. A tanned man jumps off a gleaming white 78 foot sailboat. He's just raced his team to victory.
- [01:33]
Simon Jack
He pulls on a polo shirt and chinos and boards his waiting private jet. It's time to get back to the boardroom. But why not have a little fun first?
- [01:41]
Zing Singh
He flies his plane low over the boats. He's just beaten, rubbing salt into the wounds of his competitors.
- [01:48]
Simon Jack
It's immature, but hey, this is Silicon Valley's most notorious playboy and he plays to win.
- [01:56]
Zing Singh
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Every episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.
- [02:02]
Simon Jack
We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million onto a billion.
- [02:07]
Zing Singh
And my name is Zing Singh. I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.
- [02:10]
Simon Jack
And I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.
- [02:13]
Zing Singh
Now, a few listeners have actually specifically asked for this billionaire, including Alex from York in the United Kingdom who wrote hi Simon and Zheng. I just want to say how much I enjoy Good Bad Billionaire. You've nailed that perfect mix of storytelling, business insight and moral debate that makes each profile genuinely thought provoking. Thanks, Alex. He goes on to say, I have a suggestion for a future episode. The ultimate tech maverick. Brash, brilliant and controversial. Larry Ellison Alex goes on to say
- [02:40]
Simon Jack
he built Oracle into one of the most powerful software companies on earth, helped define Silicon Valley culture, and now owns a Hawaiian island. He's the archetype of the rebel, billionaire, visionary to some, ruthless to others. And his personal contradictions would make for a great episode. Well, Alex, we agree.
- [02:59]
Zing Singh
In fact, 81 year old Larry Ellison is currently jostling for the number two richest person in the world spot. Although sometimes he's down at 5, up at 2. It varies.
- [03:08]
Simon Jack
It depends entirely on the share price of their massive holdings at any given time. Although he's twice been the richest person on the planet, briefly, his current net
- [03:16]
Zing Singh
worth is $240 billion.
- [03:19]
Simon Jack
Yeah, and he amassed this enormous fortune by founding a software company in the late 1970s.
- [03:24]
Zing Singh
Oracle made databases at the dawn of the age. But unlike its contemporaries and rivals, including Microsoft and IBM, you may never have heard of it.
- [03:34]
Simon Jack
And just to let you know, there is some sexual content in this episode. And perhaps databases don't sound like the sexiest story, but as listener Alex put it so well, Larry is anything but boring. He owns two fighter jets for one thing. So let us travel back 81 years to where it all began.
- [03:54]
Zing Singh
Lawrence Ellison was born in 1944 in Manhattan, New York. His mother, Florence Spellman, was 19 years old. She was unmarried. And Larry never met his biological father, a neighborhood boy who was too immature to stay and raise him.
- [04:09]
Simon Jack
Florence tried to bring up the baby herself, but at nine months old, Larry got pneumonia and almost died. So she gave him up, sending him to live with her aunt and uncle in Chicago.
- [04:19]
Zing Singh
Lillian and Lewis Ellison brought Larry up as their own. He only found out he was adopted when he was 12 years old. And it was only as an adult that he found out his adoptive mother was a blood relative.
- [04:29]
Simon Jack
Fascinating backstory that, and wonder how that plays out for the rest of his life. Because he was raised in a two bed apartment on the south side of Chicago. That's the kind of poor side he described the area as. A lower middle class neighborhood. According to Larry. We didn't have any money, but we weren't poor. Larry was headstrong at home. He decided he was not religious from an early age, refused to participate in a bar mitzvah, much the despair of Linian and Lewis.
- [04:55]
Zing Singh
Now he actually found out he was adopted at the age of 12, so that probably wasn't long before that. And I wonder if that led to his sense of teenage rebellion.
- [05:03]
Simon Jack
Maybe. He certainly didn't get on with Lewis. A childhood friend said he hated his father. Larry was Basically the kind of guy who would say expletive you to anybody, even his own father.
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Zing Singh
And that attitude carried on all the way to high school. Where a friend remembered him as very intense, very opinionated. Larry said, I had a habit of asking questions that irritated my teachers. I was a little bit disruptive. I just didn't believe what they were saying. When someone describes themselves as a little bit disruptive in school, if that's coming
- [05:32]
Simon Jack
from them, it means they're a total living nightmare.
- [05:35]
Zing Singh
Exactly. Well, at school, Larry wasn't particularly academic either. He did well enough, though, to get a place as a pre med student at the University of Illinois in 1962.
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Simon Jack
He actually arrived in the style that he would carry through his life, really. He arrived on a three wheel Harley Davidson motorbike, which he'd got cheap at a police auction. He was there for two years. During his time, he won an award as science student of the year for. But in the middle of finals, his adoptive mother died of kidney cancer. He said, it was awful. I cried a lot. I just left and never went back. So we've got some quite interesting elements of his story here. Adopted, loses his adopted mother at the age of 20. Hates his adoptive father. Feels rebellious, feels alone.
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Zing Singh
I mean, also for all of this to happen before you even turn 21. That is quite a powerful engine for, I think, whatever fuels you for the rest of your life, I think.
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Simon Jack
Yeah, exactly. I think that those are emotional energy batteries, aren't they? In many ways. And let's see how it plays out.
- [06:31]
Zing Singh
Well, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, but only lasted one semester. In part because he was back at home living unhappily with Lewis. Interestingly, over the years, sources including the New York Times, have included the fact that he held BS and Ms. Degrees in physics. Something that Larry didn't actually correct. Now, this sort of thing comes up a lot while researching this episode. The facts about Larry Ellison's life can be a little bit slippery.
- [06:56]
Simon Jack
Yeah. But what we do know for sure is in the summer of 1966, age 22, he leaves home, spends all his savings on a turquoise Thunderbird convertible. That's a very cool car.
- [07:07]
Zing Singh
He's a cool guy, you might say.
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Simon Jack
And he packs his leather jacket, of course, his guitar, of course, and drives to Berkeley, California. And this is the mid-60s, when this area, the San Francisco barrier, is the epicenter of the hippie movement. Places like Haight, Ashbury, and crucially, of course, the nascent Silicon Valley he described as the perfect place for an undisciplined selfish, 20 something to begin his search for himself. At this point, I'm quite jealous of him. This sounds like fun.
- [07:33]
Zing Singh
I reckon that in an alternative universe, there's a Larry Ellison who never left Haight Ashbury and is still kicking around with his now vintage Thunderbird. Well, with no money, Larry Ellison needs to get a job in San Francisco. But he had gotten something valuable during the short time he spent at the University of Chicago. In his physics class, he'd learned to program an IBM 1401 computer. He didn't love computer programming, but he was good at it. He said computer programming gave me the same kind of satisfaction as solving math problems and playing chess. Both things I enjoyed before I became a confused teenager.
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Simon Jack
So he turns up an employment agency with this skill in his back pocket looking for a part time job as a computer programmer. And over the next few years he bounced from job to job doing this programming, including some big companies like Wells Fargo bank, the tech company Amdahl. But he also found something else at the employment agency, or should I say someone else.
- [08:27]
Zing Singh
Ada was a student working part time at the agency. Within months they got married. She said, I hardly knew him. He was the most fascinating man I'd ever met in my life. I knew I would never be bored. Although Larry on his part has said I think she was better off bored.
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Simon Jack
According to Ada, he had champagne tastes on a beer budget. I like that. And Larry admitted he was cavalier with money. Between them they were earning about $1,600 a month. That's around 13,000 today. So above the average household for sure. But by name is R on this though. He bought a $1,000 motorcycle, got a nose job by a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and borrowed $3,000, around 25,000 today to buy a 34 foot sailboat while still making monthly payments on a smaller boat. So he likes boats.
- [09:14]
Zing Singh
Ada left Larry in 1974 and both of them agreed this was a turning point in his life. Larry said, my wife was divorcing me because I lacked ambition. Once again I was unable to live up to the expectations of others. But this time I was not disappointed in myself for failing to be than they thought I should be.
- [09:32]
Simon Jack
Interesting, someone who lacked ambition. That is not something you would describe of the Larry Ellison we know today. Anyway, Larry gets a new job programming at the electronics company Ampex, where he was put on a project funded by the CIA. Worth noting actually, that one of the biggest investors in many Silicon Valley startups has always been the US government. Same is true of Musk by the Way, especially in things like military and intelligence.
- [09:55]
Zing Singh
The CIA had a secret code name for their Ampex project, Oracle. They wanted a ginormous database for Larry Ellison. Says they were never told, of course. He said, I figured out some of what they were doing. I shouldn't say much else. I don't want to get a call in the middle of the night.
- [10:11]
Simon Jack
Oh, you know, very sort of sexually mysterious that, isn't it?
- [10:14]
Zing Singh
Yeah. Certainly not a call you want to get from a spook.
- [10:16]
Simon Jack
Yeah. Anyway, we should just talk a little bit about the boring but crucial fact in this story of databases.
- [10:23]
Zing Singh
Yes.
- [10:24]
Simon Jack
If you work for a company, you will know that most companies have a database. You put things like your customer details, human resource records, sales inventory. You can make financial forecasts. You've got client relationship software, all goes into the database. Remember before computers, all this stuff would be in little box cards and sort of on paper, filed alphabetically in cabinets. I'm not proud of this. I remember this era, but this is the dawn of the information age. The introduction of computers meant the amount of information needing to be stored was growing exponentially. And importantly, the ability to access that information in a really handy way was going to be really important thing.
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Zing Singh
So before the dawn of computer databases, you mean, if you wanted to check out how many customers you had in, say, Mumbai or Massachusetts, you would have to go to literally, a physical finding.
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Simon Jack
You probably couldn't even find that out because your customers were probably been filed alphabetically, not by region. These different bits of information would be very hard to extract. So this is why this is a big deal.
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Zing Singh
We're Talking about the 70s, right. So Ampex's possible solution to the issue of storing and retrieving loads of information was to use videotape. But in time, they realized that the Ampex database wasn't working. In fact, it was described as something of a disaster.
- [11:48]
Simon Jack
Larry knew this, and he would spend long lunches discussing the issues over games of chess or tennis with two colleagues, Bob Minor and Ed Oates. Ed Oates said between tennis matches, Bob was writing code and implementing things, while Larry was mostly talking about becoming rich and famous. The normal Larry stuff.
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Zing Singh
Interesting insight into his personality there. Well, in 1977, Larry left AIMPEX and was working at another tech company, but said, I could never really survive inside a conventional corporation. Around this time, he read a research paper by an IBM employee called Edgar F. Codd that introduced something revolutionary called the relational model for databases. Larry could see its potential. It got around the many problems of the databases that were existing and Kicking around.
- [12:31]
Simon Jack
Yeah. Edgar Codd's paper had been written in 1970 and in the years since then, I, which at that time was the world's largest computer company, had been creating prototypes. And when Larry read the research which IBM made public, he thought if we were clever, we could take IBM's research, build the commercial system and beat IBM to the marketplace with this technology because we thought we could move faster than they could.
- [12:54]
Zing Singh
So Larry and his former IMPEX colleagues Bob and Ed decided to form their own company, which they called Software Development laboratories. They invested two grand of their own money, of which Larry contributed $1,200. Over six grand got 60% of the company, while Bob and Ed each got 20 and Larry got the majority. Because SDL was his baby. He pushed it through and according to Ed, he had more chutzpah than the two of us combined.
- [13:19]
Simon Jack
Larry said it was impossible to get investment software at the time was this vague notion. There was nothing tangible. We were Persona non grasser in the venture capital community who were only interested at that time in hardware companies. But fortunately software is not a capital intensive business. You can do it all on a shoestring. You don't have to make stuff physically. It's code.
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Zing Singh
They initially start out as a consultancy business, winning individual contracts. And their first contract was with the CIA designing a giant database, the kind that Impacts had failed to do. Larry asked for $400,000, a lowball figure that almost lost in the bid. But they won it and got a 50 grand advance in just a few months.
- [14:00]
Simon Jack
Ed and their first employee, Bruce Scott, programmed their own database based on this rel model. And they named it guess what Oracle borrowed from that earlier CIA project. And because the database was meant to be able to answer any question, it was coarse. The idea was that it was an oracle of wisdom.
- [14:18]
Zing Singh
But the contract money from the CIA took a long time to come in. According to Larry, we were running out of money. I couldn't make my mortgage payments. The co founders realized that their business model of winning individual contracts meant that, as Bob put it, you're either working or you're trying to get work. Instead, they realized a better model for the business would be to just write and sell one program over and over again.
- [14:39]
Simon Jack
And sell it over again. Exactly. In 1979, two years after founding the company, they released their database. Now Oracle was the first commercially available relational database. Meaning you can have lots of different fields, like people from Mumbai, people who are over 50, people who've got three kids, all this different stuff. You can pull out these different bits of information at will. And they got it out first, beating IBM, despite using IBM's research, of course. And Larry believed customers wouldn't buy a product called Version One, so he named it Version Two. That's really interesting. Suggesting their product had already been tested, revised and improved.
- [15:16]
Zing Singh
So he doesn't just have chutzpah, he's also got good marketing knowledge.
- [15:20]
Simon Jack
That's. I love that detail. Call it Version two, even though it's Version one. So people think, oh, the mistakes have already been made. They've debugged it.
- [15:27]
Zing Singh
It's a trusted product. Well, Larry was chief executive and also their salesman. And so steadily the company grew as Larry sold Oracle to more and more companies across the U.S. now, meanwhile, as
- [15:38]
Simon Jack
this has been going on, Larry has got married to Nancy Whee Jenkins, a Stanford University student. But just two years later, they divorced. She sold her shares, and the company backed him for just $500. I dread to think what those are worth now.
- [15:50]
Zing Singh
Nancy Wheeler, if you're listening to this, don't kick yourself. Well, in 1981, Larry started dating his receptionist, Barbara Booth. And a year later, they had the first of two children together, a son they called David. We will hear more about David later.
- [16:03]
Simon Jack
Sure, Will.
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Zing Singh
In 1983, Barbara and Larry got married. But according to her, a couple hours before the wedding, Larry presented her with a prenuptial agreement prenup that revealed the extent of his wealth. For this episode, we've drawn from Mike Wilson's biography, the Difference Between God and Larry Ellison. God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. A fantastic name for a biography. And when biographer Mike Wilson asked him about this, he said, I don't want to get into disputes between me and Barbara, which will affect the kids. If that means I'm just not going to answer or defend this at all, then I'll have to live with that.
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Simon Jack
According to the document, his salary was $130,000. He had a million dollars in property, and almost the same again in cash and miscel. Bits and pieces. And most valuable, of course, he estimated his stock in his company to be worth over $10 million. So we can be sure that by 1983, Larry Ellison is a millionaire.
- [16:58]
Zing Singh
Barbara and Larry got divorced three years later. He's got a habit of this, as we'll find out. But as with ada, they remained good friends. In fact, Barbara says she found it hard to date anyone after him because they pale in comparison.
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Simon Jack
Yes, I hope that Barbara's partner is not listening. Right. Okay, let's go from a million to A billion. The year Larry married Barbara, 1983, Larry renamed the company Oracle Corporation. Its growth skyrocketed when Larry decided to make their database portable, which means being compatible with every major computer operating system. Or as Larry put it, our policy is to be promiscuous.
- [17:46]
Zing Singh
That's one way of putting it.
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Simon Jack
So, and that makes obvious business sense, doesn't it? Because at that time, the architectures for computers were actually quite different. So he wanted to make something would work on any hardware platform. And the business rationale for that is obvious.
- [18:00]
Zing Singh
Yeah, more customers, more money, more revenue.
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Simon Jack
And it worked well.
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Zing Singh
Company sales doubled every year since they began, up to 55 million by 1986. And Oracle at this point was a big company. They had 450 employees. And so they decided to do the thing that successful companies do.
- [18:18]
Simon Jack
You will have heard a lot of in this podcast. They did an IPO.
- [18:20]
Zing Singh
Yes, they went public on March 12, 1986, and by this point, Larry's stake was down to 34%. But after the successful IPO, that 34% alone was worth $90 million.
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Simon Jack
But they're not the only kids on the block at this time. The celebrations probably didn't last long, because the very next day, Microsoft also went public, putting Bill Gates stake in his company at $300 million. By the way, you can listen to our Bill Gates epis in the archive. Why would Larry care? Well, there's a quote attributed to Genghis Khan, among others, that Larry has repeated often to Oracle employees as well as in interviews. It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.
- [19:00]
Zing Singh
He's come a long way from that 22 year old bumming around San Francisco
- [19:05]
Simon Jack
in his vintage T bird, and it's very interesting. So the competitive streak about who's richest, who's got the best company, clear. Even at this early stage in the technology revolution.
- [19:14]
Zing Singh
Larry has discussed how he's inspired by Japanese business philosophy, one he describes as an aggressive pursuit of market share. This was, he said, absolutely our primary goal. Well, it makes sense because if you dominate the market, you dominate the share of investment, you dominate the kind of money you're making, and also brand awareness. But at this point, several companies were trying to compete for dominance in the relational database market, and the competition was fierce. It became known as the database wars.
- [19:43]
Simon Jack
Exciting. But Larry was ready for war, in his words. He pursued growth relentlessly. And he did this by building what the Washington Post described as one of the most aggressive sales forces in computing history. Sales are crucial. Companies will prioritize signing new customers for Two reasons, and we see this in a lot of different businesses. One, switching costs. Once a customer has bought your software, switching costs money, time, effort, changing from one service to another. And two, customer lock in. They become dependent on a product, makes it difficult to leave. Something breaks, you've got to call them. I can tell you that I've seen mergers between companies fail because they can't translate the software or the operating system or their IT from one platform to another. Big mergers have collapsed because that is really difficult. So you get someone, you've often got them for life.
- [20:34]
Zing Singh
Yeah. If you've ever tried to switch electricity or gas suppliers, you understand what we're talking about.
- [20:38]
Simon Jack
Well, that is considerably easier, I can tell you, than changing your enterprise software, the software that runs your entire organization.
- [20:44]
Zing Singh
Well, a former Oracle sales rep said the management theory was simple. Go out and don't come back before you have a signed contract. And Oracle, Oracle arguably didn't have the best product out there on the market. But Larry and his sales reps sold a vision of the company. In fact, they were known to sell customers technology that they didn't even actually have yet.
- [21:04]
Simon Jack
Not unusual, I think, for salesman, honestly. Anyway, his relentless pursuit of growth worked. Oracle doubled sales every year for over a decade. And by 1987, Oracle was the world's largest database management company. And he rewarded his team in flashy ways. He even paid sales bonuses in bags of gold coins.
- [21:21]
Zing Singh
Yeah, it kind of makes Google and Meta's free lunches and dinners pale comparison.
- [21:26]
Simon Jack
Bag of gold coming home from work saying how to go pretty good. Here you go. Boom. Look at that.
- [21:30]
Zing Singh
Yeah, hopefully. Did it make a dent in the kitchen table? In an oral history of that period, a vice president of sales at Oracle said, what happens is when you've got a lot of money at stake, you go right up to the edge, to the line on the rules. And then you look at the money that's available and you start thinking, well, maybe it's okay to go over that line. In Larry's words. I knew eventually this, and he's talking about the very rapid growth year would hit us. And when we hit the wall, we hit it very, very hard.
- [21:57]
Simon Jack
In fact, in 1990, Oracle found itself on the brink of bankruptcy because an accounting scandal involving inflated sales. The sales team had been recording revenues before they actually got the money. And Oracle had hundreds of millions of dollars in uncollected bills from customers. Larry described it as a horrible, horrible mistake. I didn't know what I was doing.
- [22:17]
Zing Singh
Oracle was forced to restate previously reported earnings Restarted, devastating reported earnings.
- [22:22]
Simon Jack
It's a massive. No, no. Basically, it shakes all your important stakeholders faith in the company. Your shareholders, they think, well, we can't believe the financial results.
- [22:31]
Zing Singh
We can't trust you.
- [22:32]
Simon Jack
The banks who lend you the money, they say, hang on a second, we're lending you money on numbers you're giving us. If these numbers aren't right, you know, should we lend you any more money? Usually when you have to do that, somebody gets fired. Chief financial officer, CEO steps down. Something bad happens as a result of that.
- [22:47]
Zing Singh
So he's lucky really to have survived the axe for everything that went down at Oracle at this point.
- [22:51]
Simon Jack
Well, I think had he done been, you know, the chief executive in someone else's company, he probably would have been fired. It's his company, so, you know, he. He does the firing rather than the fir.
- [23:01]
Zing Singh
Well, the company's stock value fell by 80%. He laid off 400 employees. That's 10% of the workforce. At the time, shareholders actually brought lawsuits against Oracle and the SEC fined them $100,000. The cases were settled without Oracle or Larry admitting wrongdoing.
- [23:17]
Simon Jack
And I remember seeing an interview with Larry Ellison, he said this. This was the darkest time in his entire career. And the way he puts it is that we were now a billion dollar company and I still had the same team for when we were a $10 million company. So it's 100 times the size. And what I realized was that the skill set you need from your team to run a billion dollar company is not the same as the skill set you need when you're a $10 million company. Both are important skills, but they're not the same. And so he said, I had to go to people I'd started this company, wouldn't fire them. And he said that it made. Made him too depressed to leave his house. I let everyone down. But he also described it as a moment of clarity. He overhauled Oracle's accounting policies. He tightened financial controls, brought in, as I say, more experienced senior executives. And he said he was changing his own management style. I used to practice what I jokingly referred to as management by ridicule. People would be terrified to come into meetings. At least he's honest about that.
- [24:14]
Zing Singh
Well, this was also a really big moment in Larry's personal life as he almost died while surfing in Hawaii. He broke his neck and he punctured his own lung with a rib. And only months later, he had another accident while bike racing in Napa. My humerus bone, he said, basically exploded out through the arm.
- [24:33]
Simon Jack
Yuck.
- [24:33]
Zing Singh
I mean both these events and their locations, we have to say, point to the sort of lifestyle Larry enjoys. He loves adrenaline, he loves luxury. But it led him in these two instances, almost to death.
- [24:45]
Simon Jack
Yeah, it's funny how many of these go getters do like this, you know, they don't like helly skiing skiing or hazardous high adrenaline sports. It's, I think it goes with some of the territory. But then an interesting development. In 1992, he hired a private investigator to find his biological mother, Florence. She had no clue he'd become one of the richest men in America. So he bought her a house and paid her daughter's college tuition. And they stayed in touch until she died seven years later. So a strand wrapped up there in a way.
- [25:12]
Zing Singh
Yeah.
- [25:12]
Simon Jack
Wonder what Florence made it. Hey mom, guess what? I'm one of the richest men in America. America. I'd love to see the, you know how that went down.
- [25:18]
Zing Singh
I mean she probably had to have a sit down for a bit. So Larry Ellison has escaped death. He's reunited with his biological mother. But you know, they say good things come in threes. And the 90s scandal, the in his words near corporate death turned out to just be a blip. Oracle maintained its lead in the market and in 1992 they released version seven of the database. It worked really well. It proved incredibly popular. And so the next year Forbes declared Larry a billionaire worth $1.46 billion at the age of 49.
- [26:05]
Simon Jack
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- [28:28]
Simon Jack
So let's go beyond a billion this wasn't the end of the database wars which were really only just hotting up in the 90s. According to a senior vice president Oracle at the time, it was the period of not just compete with but eliminate the other competition competitors. And Larry's philosophy was very clear, you only compete with one company per year.
- [28:45]
Zing Singh
So one by one they picked off their competitors, tracking rival sales teams muscling in on their business. That same Oracle VP explained that when they turned their sights on the rival company Informix, it was such an amazingly focused effort. Within 12 months Infomix was basically on the floor. Well, an executive at Informix described Oracle as the evil empire.
- [29:06]
Simon Jack
So really is a kind of ruthless Darwinian struggle for supremacy in Larry's mind, right?
- [29:12]
Zing Singh
Yeah. And Oracle being like the death star turning the laser on a planet.
- [29:17]
Simon Jack
Yeah. And it's interesting, I mean this period in the 1990s and I can remember in California, I can't think of anyone I worked in tech who hadn't spent some time working at Oracle. It was kind of like the company, it was everywhere. And having worked at Oracle you could pretty much go and work anywhere else. It was seen as a great starting place for lots of people. But one of their most formidable competitors always becoming competitor in this space was Microsoft. Which brings us to trashgate because in 2000 the media revealed that Oracle had secretly hired a private investigative firm to dig into pro Microsoft groups. These are people who opposed the US Government's antitrust case against Microsoft. Antitrust meaning that everyone was using Windows and that was seen as a monopoly at the time. And people were saying, is that a healthy thing? And the private investigators allegedly were offering janitors money for the trash thrown out by Microsoft allies.
- [30:06]
Zing Singh
Oracle acknowledged hiring the firm, although not the specific allegations about digging around in the trash for money. Larry defended the actions. It is absolutely true that we set out to expose Microsoft's covert activities. If Microsoft is creating front organizations as in those pro Microsoft groups, I feel very good about bringing that information to the public. Microsoft said that Larry's admission was dramatic evidence that Microsoft's competitors have engaged in a massive and ongoing campaign to unfairly tarnish Microsoft's public image.
- [30:37]
Simon Jack
But by the millennium, Oracle essentially won the database awards. They'd also broadened into wider enterprise software. That means software for accounting, financial software, etc. Etc. I remember, period, every single company was thinking, I've got to basically spend most of my investment on it, otherwise I'm going to get left behind.
- [30:54]
Zing Singh
And it's funny because when we talk about big tech stories, we often think about the banner name companies, you know, like Google, Meta, Microsoft. But actually there's a lot of money to be made in making software for businesses. A lot of software that you might never even have heard of unless you work in that specific business.
- [31:10]
Simon Jack
Yeah, if you're. Yeah, if you're a chief technology officer or if you're an IT manager around this period, then Oracle would be a very big name to you, but probably not as a consumer. It wouldn't have been so clear.
- [31:19]
Zing Singh
So Oracle was the leading provider in a booming market. So it's perhaps not surprising then that in 2000, the Wall Street Journal identified Larry Ellison as the world's richest person. He was worth $50 billion. He'd just overtaken Bill Gates at 49.4 billion. He must have loved that. Helped along by the antitrust case against Microsoft.
- [31:39]
Simon Jack
Yeah. And it's worth noting, at the end of that year, Forbes still listed Bill Gates as richer than Larry Ellison. Something Larry seemed quite miffed that in an interview at the time, he told the Washington Post he was the richest person and that Forbes spots Bill as many billions as he needs.
- [31:53]
Zing Singh
So not a man to lose graciously, in other words. Well, whether he was the richest or not, Larry was definitely spending that money. He bought a Soviet MiG fighter jet, but the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms initially blocked its import because, according to Larry, they considered it a weapon. So instead he bought An Italian Marchetti fighter jet.
- [32:11]
Simon Jack
I'm sure the makers of this Italian fighter jet request quite crushed that their efforts weren't considered a weapon.
- [32:17]
Zing Singh
Yeah, not quite up to the scratch of the Soviets, I'm afraid. Well, Larry actually sued the city of San Jose after he was cited for violating rules around night takeoffs and landings at their international airport. And he won the case so he could fly that Marchetti fighter jet wherever he wanted.
- [32:32]
Simon Jack
And it's not just the jets. He's also a passionate yachtsman. He's invested very heavily in competitive sailing, even leading Team Oracle USA to multiple America's cup victories. That's an expensive pastime, ocean yacht racing, the America's cup cost millions. Millions and millions. He was one of the highest paid executives in Silicon Valley, though. And it was revealed in 2006 he had access to a billion dollars in credit. So imagine having credit card with your limit of $1 billion. His accountant had told him to budget and plan because he was repeatedly pushing that credit limit to the max with his lifestyle.
- [33:03]
Zing Singh
If you're a billionaire and your accountant is worried, I mean, you must be spending quite a lot of money.
- [33:08]
Simon Jack
Well, it's quite interesting, this idea. Do you think, if you've got all that money, why do you need credit?
- [33:11]
Zing Singh
It.
- [33:12]
Simon Jack
And it's quite common, actually, because a lot of people's massive wealth will be like an Elon Musk, for example, will be in the shares that they own in the companies, and they don't want to sell those every time they need some money. So what will generally happen is a bank will come along and say, you know, you've got $20 billion worth of shares. I'll give you a credit line of, let's say, 5 billion, so you have liquidity, so you don't have to cash in your chips all the time. So a lot of rich people use these kind of bank facilities, and banks like doing it because they charge them money and they think, they think they're good for it.
- [33:41]
Zing Singh
Let's also take a moment to catch up on his romantic life. We've already discussed three marriages, and he goes on to marry three more times. Let's go through them very quickly. Melanie Craft in 2003, Steve Jobs, his close friend, is their wedding photographer. 2015 marries Nikita Khan, 47 years his junior. And in 2024, now in his 80s, he marries Joe Linzu, also 47 years younger. So he's got. Let me just count them up. So six. Lucky number six. Jolene, we're rooting for you.
- [34:10]
Simon Jack
Larry has a reputation as A playboy. One relationship even ended up in legal trouble. In 1993, a former Oracle executive assistant named Adeline Lee sued him, alleging she was fired after trying to break up a relationship with him. In the suit, she claimed that when she visited him at home to tell him, he pushed her onto a bed and attempted to force her to have sex with him or else.
- [34:32]
Zing Singh
Larry insisted she was fired for cause. He told the San Francisco Age examiner, that's just not true. She came over to my house an hour late. We were supposed to go to dinner and a movie. There was no time for us to have dinner, so I wanted to have sex. So we had sex. The thing was, she said she didn't want to have sex, she wanted to go to dinner. But finally she said, okay, this apparently is where I forced her to have sex.
- [34:52]
Simon Jack
Oracle denied her claims and settled the lawsuit for $100,000. But then Adeline Lee was later convicted of perjury and falsifying an email as evidence of Ellison directing her firing.
- [35:04]
Zing Singh
So Larry Ellison's private life definite. Not one without its own controversy. Well, what has Larry been up to for the last couple of decades in the business? So, in the 2000s, Oracle made some big acquisitions of competitors, making it the largest enterprise software company. But his net worth has fluctuated with the dot com crash and, of course, the global financial crisis.
- [35:25]
Simon Jack
In 2014, after 37 years, Larry stepped down as Oracle CEO, becoming executive chairman and chief Technology officer. I mean, there's quite a lot of backseat driving going on to this day, I'm pretty sure at Oracle, executive chairman means you're still in charge. Basically, yeah. But that decade, the tens, the 2010s, Oracle's growth actually stagnated because it was slow to recognize the importance of cloud computing. Cloud computing is where you store lots and lots of data, not in your own premises, but on servers which are remote, which a lot of companies now rent the service space from somebody else, and that's the cloud. Anyway, Larry thought it was a passing fashion and publicly dismissed it as complete gibberish.
- [36:07]
Zing Singh
Oh, dear. Well, perhaps because they were slow to cloud computing, Oracle has recently bet big on the latest tech gold rush. AI. Oracle is becoming a major AI infrastructure provider. It's partnered with companies like OpenAI to run their models on Oracle's cloud infrastructure.
- [36:23]
Simon Jack
Yeah, so basically providing some of the computing power. They've done a $300 billion deal with OpenAI over the next several years. And AI Boom sent Larry's net worth skyrocketing. And in September 2025, he became the second person ever to be worth More than $400 billion. And briefly, and it happened for like 24 hours, overtook Elon Musk as the world's richest person.
- [36:46]
Zing Singh
But there are questions. Some analysts worry AI could be another bubble. And a drop in Oracle stock in December has led investors to question whether Oracle's big spending on AI will actually pay off. But like many billionaires, Larry's diversified his investments so he could potentially, potentially be making big money elsewhere.
- [37:04]
Simon Jack
Yeah, well, one good example is Oracle is one of a consortium of American companies who will take over control of TikTok from the Chinese company ByteDance. You may have read that in the news. There was a whole thing about we need to basically find an American owner for the American bits of TikTok. You can actually listen to our episode on Zhang Yiming for more of the TikTok story.
- [37:26]
Zing Singh
But now it's about time we reintroduce Larry's son, David. Now, if you hang out with film people at all, you'll know that the president of very, very rich people, often the sons and daughters of millionaires, billionaires, is ever present in Hollywood. They're the people kind of financing things behind the scenes. And David has been described by journalist Marina Hyde as Kendall Ellison in reference to the eldest boy from succession, the
- [37:52]
Simon Jack
Kendall Roy character in succession, which is a poison chalice, isn't it? Being the sort of, I say, you know, I wouldn't mind, wouldn't mind being the favorite one. Give me that, give me that poisoned chalice, please. Anyway, in the mid to 2000s, when David Ellison was just 23, he founded a film production company called sky dance. In 2009, David raised $350 million to finance a five year partnership with Paramount to co produce movies. And Larry, his dad, provided a big chunk of that. And over the next decade, Skydance grew into a very big major media company, producing blockbusters like Mission Impossible, Top Gun, Maverick, a bunch of others.
- [38:31]
Zing Singh
So we get to 2024 and David, with that financial backing from his dad Larry, along with other investors, Boug, Paramount's parent company, National Amusements, for $8 billion. The deal closed in August 2025 and Skydance was merged with Paramount.
- [38:46]
Simon Jack
Yeah, and this deal made David and Larry, of course, one of the most powerful duos in Hollywood. David became Paramount, Skydance's chairman and CEO, overseeing more than 1200 film titles, TV channels. They own things like MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, CBS News. But remember, it's dad who controls the money and owns the equity. So this deal made Larry, now in his 80s, an incredibly powerful movie mogul as well.
- [39:11]
Zing Singh
And this story is still very much live. In late 2025, after Netflix had bid to buy Warner Brothers discovery, the ellisons put in 108.4 billion hostile bid to acquire Warners.
- [39:24]
Simon Jack
Now, a hostile bid is what you generally do if you want to take over a company is you go and talk to the board of directors of the company you want to buy and say, here's our offer. Don't you think it's great? And then, then the board of directors go to their shareholders and say, we, your. Your board recommend that you accept this deal. When it goes hostile is when the board say, we don't like this. Instead, what happens is the company that wants to buy goes straight to the shareholders and say, listen, your board don't know what they're doing. I'm offering you tons of money. Ignore them and take my money and take this bid. That's a hostile takeover bid, and that's what's going on right now. At the moment, there's an almighty tussle between Netflix and Skydance Paramount to buy Warner Brothers. Netflix is a streaming giant, and if they buy that, they'll also have HBO streaming. If Paramount Skydance buys it, the big five movie studios become the big four. Hollywood's up in arms about it. They'd rather actually Paramount buys it than Netflix because Paramount's a kind of movie studio that they kind of understand. It's a beast they recognize. But this deal is going on right now. It's very fractious. And there is a chance this deal doesn't happen at all because it's so complicated.
- [40:33]
Zing Singh
I mean, the hostile bid for now has been rejected, even after Larry added a $40 billion personal financial guarant.
- [40:40]
Simon Jack
So, you know, watch this space. Well, that is where the Larry Ellison story, although he's still hard charging, still got a wife who's 47 years younger than him. Okay.
- [40:49]
Zing Singh
Still got several fighter jets.
- [40:51]
Simon Jack
I'm just trying to think how old. No, that's not worth thinking about.
- [40:54]
Zing Singh
Now don't calculate the age gap. So we've discovered how Larry Ellison has made his billions. It's time to score him.
- [41:00]
Simon Jack
Yeah. And we have at this point, for fun, we have a bunch of categories. Wealth, controversy, philanthropy, power and legacy. And we score our billionaires between 0 and 10 in this before asking you whether you think they're a good or bad or just another billionaire. So let us start with wealth.
- [41:16]
Zing Singh
Well, there's not that much money in it between him, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg sometimes up there, sometimes around five. So, you know, he is up there
- [41:26]
Simon Jack
and he's been top of the tree twice in his career.
- [41:28]
Zing Singh
So only briefly, though.
- [41:29]
Simon Jack
Only briefly. But still, I think in that company, it's very hard not to give somebody a 10, isn't it? I mean, what, 9.9?
- [41:37]
Zing Singh
Well, I mean, even if he wasn't a 10, when we look at how he spends it, you know, he certainly has a champagne to supply the champagne taste. Now he's got, just as a quick overview, property empire worth almost 2 billion he owns, you know, as Alex, our listener said in the early part of this intro, a Hawaiian island. He bought it for $238 million in 2012. I mean, surely he's a 10.
- [42:00]
Simon Jack
Yeah, and also we also look at how far they've come. He wasn't born into wealth. He was adopted from an unmarried teenager. He lived in the south side of Chicago. Not the swanky postcode or neighbor zip code in the world. I'm going to give him a 10.
- [42:14]
Zing Singh
Yeah, he is a 10 out of 10.
- [42:16]
Simon Jack
You are a 10, Larry. He'll like that.
- [42:17]
Zing Singh
I'm sure he will.
- [42:19]
Simon Jack
In fact, he'd probably complain bitterly if we didn't give him a 10.
- [42:22]
Zing Singh
Yeah, I wonder how he feels about not being the richest man.
- [42:24]
Simon Jack
I mean, he probably thinks it's only a matter of time. We'll see.
- [42:27]
Zing Singh
Well, I like that Elon Musk has
- [42:29]
Simon Jack
a bit of competition, controversy. No shortage of that, I would say.
- [42:32]
Zing Singh
Just think about that business mantra. It's not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.
- [42:37]
Simon Jack
There was Trashgate trying to help the efforts to sort of dethrone Microsoft. Yeah, there was that big accounting scandal they had in 1990.
- [42:46]
Zing Singh
You know, he's got his checkered romantic past, his sexual relationships of employees.
- [42:50]
Simon Jack
Yeah. Oracle is also heavily involved in defense military surveillance. In fact, his very first contract was with the CIA.
- [42:57]
Zing Singh
I mean, there's just too much to go into here. But here's just one example. According to Associated Press, Oracle, among other U.S. companies, has been part of designing and building China's surveillance state in the Xinjiang region. For instance, police use Oracle to surveil the region's Uyghur Muslim population. Population. Oracle has declined to comment to the Associated Press. But, you know, as we say, the company is up to its neck in defense, military and surveillance around the world.
- [43:23]
Simon Jack
Those are, you know, controversial clients to have.
- [43:26]
Zing Singh
I would say, also worth noting, he's donated to the Israeli military through the non profit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. He gave the organization Its biggest ever donation in 2017. $16.6 million. And that is a philanthropic contribution that has drawn its share of public attention.
- [43:44]
Simon Jack
Look, I'm going to give him an eight.
- [43:46]
Zing Singh
Well, he's certainly a controversial figure as well. I mean, I just think back to what a rival executive said of Oracle, that it was like having the evil empire turning on you. Yeah. So I think it's an eight out of ten.
- [43:58]
Simon Jack
Eight. So we're both eight on that one. Philanthropy. How much of his vast wealth has he given is he going to give away? He signed the giving Pledge. Regular listeners will be aware of this. Something set up by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to give away most of your money in your lifetime. He's pledged to donate 95% of his wealth. He's done some pretty traditional philanthropy to $200 million to USC, University of Southern California for cancer research, a billion to aging and disease prevention through the Ellison Medical Foundation. He looks like someone who's not in a hurry to get old or trying to hold back that tide at any cost.
- [44:34]
Zing Singh
No, he's. He says recently he's opting to give away wealth on his terms, mainly through the Ellison Institute of Technology. That's a for profit philanthropic organization at the University of Oxford. It aims to address issues like health care, food insecur, climate change, AI.
- [44:50]
Simon Jack
Well, each year Forbes assigns what they call a philanthropy score based on certain billionaires known charitable giving. For 2024 they found Larry had given away less than 1% of his wealth, which puts him roughly on a par with Elon Musk. So I would say 1% of wealth gets a 1 out of 10 from me.
- [45:08]
Zing Singh
Wow. I mean, less than 1% of his wealth really. I feel like for someone who is occasionally tied with Elon Musk for wealth, occasionally beating Elon Musk wealth giving a away the same that Elon has. I've got to give him the same as I give Elon, which is zero.
- [45:24]
Simon Jack
Okay. One from me, zero from you. Power and legacy. Wired, a tech magazine. An article in 2025 said in Donald Trump's second term, one of the President's advisors described Larry as a literal shadow president of the United States. So that is a testament that he's pretty powerful and he's got lots of influence in many areas, business, government, of course, media, movies.
- [45:47]
Zing Singh
So he's come such a long way from just being that thunderbird driving semi hippie in San Francisco. I mean, being called the shadow president of the United States.
- [45:59]
Simon Jack
You know, he's one of those people who can pick up the Phone and pretty much talk to anyone he wants to. So I would give him pretty high on this in terms of power, I think legacy less so. He didn't really invent anything. Do you know what I mean? No, he's.
- [46:10]
Zing Singh
He was there at the right time.
- [46:11]
Simon Jack
He unlocks the power of databases. He managed us to snuff out the competition. I mean, I should say that there is a powerful European competitor to Oracle called SAP. That's probably the only other game in town on some of this stuff. And it'll be interesting to see who harnesses AI best in the coming years. For power, I'm gonna give him an eight.
- [46:30]
Zing Singh
I would say for power, he's an eight for me. But for legacy, I mean, if you went up to the average person on the street and you said, hey, what do you think of Larry Ellison? They'd go, larry who? Yeah, I would give him an eight for power and a five for legacy. So what's the average of that? Six and a half.
- [46:45]
Simon Jack
Six and a half.
- [46:45]
Zing Singh
So I would say I'd give him a seven in this category.
- [46:48]
Simon Jack
So is Larry Ellison good, bad, or just another billionaire? What do you think? Email us at Good, bad, billionaire. That's all one wordbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176 and tell us what you think.
- [47:04]
Zing Singh
And don't forget to include your name as we may read out your message on a future episode.
- [47:08]
Simon Jack
We got an email from John about our Elon Musk episode. He says, despite his faults, I think Elon Musk is a good billionaire. I'm probably biased because one of his neuralink brain computer interfaces implanted into my motor cortex right now. Wow. Wow. All I can say, whatever your politics are for me, he didn't need to start this neuralink project. He could have just sat there on some yacht in a beautiful country. But no, he chose to try and help people like me with a spinal cord injury or others with als. I absolutely love your show. Please keep going. John is the 18th person to receive an implant in the world and the fifth person to receive it in the United States, United Kingdom.
- [47:47]
Zing Singh
Wow, Talk about a trailblazer. Who emailed into us.
- [47:51]
Simon Jack
Super thrilled you getting in touch, John. Thank you for that. And keep us, keep in touch with us. I'd love to know how that is going, to be honest. So do keep in touch.
- [47:59]
Zing Singh
We've had a couple of listeners get in touch. Following our episode on Gymshark, founder Ben Francis Harris from London sent us a WhatsApp to say I absolutely love your podcast and cannot get enough of it. Thank you Harris. I re listen to every episode as I find the stories capture captivating. I think Ben Francis is a good billionaire. He's created a successful private company at a time when the sports market was dominated by giants like Adidas, Nike and Puma. That's very true. And he could be credited with popularizing sports influencing in the uk. Can't wait for the next episode. Keep up the amazing work. Thank you Harris.
- [48:32]
Simon Jack
Thank you Harris. Yeah. And Max, from Ben Francis's hometown of Bromsgrave, whatsapped us to say? I play cricket with Ben Francis when we were kids. Let's just say he's better at sewing than he was at wicketkeeping.
- [48:45]
Zing Singh
Well, talk about being brought down to earth by an old childhood friend, Ben.
- [48:49]
Simon Jack
Thank you very much indeed, Max. So who have we got next episode
- [48:57]
Zing Singh
we have someone who's been called the king of Indian media.
- [49:00]
Simon Jack
Basically changed the way that people in India consume tv from the early days of King cable tv right through relationships with Rupert Murdoch and Disney and has had an enormous impact on the viewing habits of the world's most populous country.
- [49:15]
Zing Singh
But funnily enough, he started out in business selling toothbrushes.
- [49:19]
Simon Jack
Yeah. His name is Ronnie Struvala and he is our next billionaire.
- [49:24]
Zing Singh
Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Hannah Hufford. The researcher is Hannah Ramazani, the editor is Paul Smith and it's a BB Studios production for the BBC World Service. The senior commissioning producer is Sarah Green and the Commissioning editor is John Manell. It's the ultimate business trip flying in Emirates first class with your own fully enclosed private suite. You can order from an extensive international menu along with pre premium drinks. There's even a bar and an exclusive shower spa on the Emirates A 380 along with chauffeur driven airport transfers and the Emirates lounge. It's a better way to do business. Book now on Emirates. Com.