From Database Dynasty to AI Gamble: Why 81-Year-Old Larry Ellison Just Became the Richest, Again

On September 10, 2025, the world woke up to a plot twist: an 81-year-old tech mogul knocked Elon Musk off the richest-person throne. Larry Ellison’s net worth hit $393 billion in a single day, surging over $100 billion after Oracle landed a jaw-dropping $300 billion partnership with OpenAI. His latest spouse, Jolin Zhu—a woman 47 years younger—quietly entered his world in 2024, a reminder that Ellison’s life has always been written in contradictions.

The Oracle Moment: When History Repeats, Usually Differently

Most people think Oracle lost the cloud war. They watched Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure dominate the early 2020s while Oracle remained the boring enterprise vendor nobody talked about at dinner parties. But Ellison saw something others didn’t: as AI infrastructure became the new battlefield, Oracle’s decades-old database expertise suddenly mattered again.

The September 2025 announcement changed everything. Oracle’s stock exploded 40% in one trading day—its largest jump since 1992. The company had quietly repositioned itself as a critical infrastructure player in the generative AI era. While competitors fought over cloud services, Ellison was already building the foundation that AI companies desperately needed. It wasn’t luck. It was timing meeting preparation.

The Man Behind the Money: A Billionaire’s Contradictions

Ellison didn’t start rich. Born to an unmarried teenager in the Bronx in 1944, he was adopted into a struggling middle-class family. He dropped out of the University of Illinois after his adoptive mother died, then again from the University of Chicago after just one semester. The penniless wanderer eventually landed at Ampex Corporation in the early 1970s, where he worked on a classified CIA project that would change everything: designing a database system called “Oracle.”

In 1977, with just $2,000 in seed capital ($1,200 from Ellison himself), he and two colleagues launched Software Development Laboratories. That simple investment became a multibillion-dollar empire. Oracle went public in 1986 and dominated the enterprise software market for decades—despite the company’s ups and downs, Ellison never wavered from his role at the center.

The Billionaire’s Paradox: Discipline Meets Excess

Here’s where Ellison becomes genuinely interesting. He’s a man of extremes who somehow makes it work.

On one side: he owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, a collection of world-class yachts, and multiple California mansions worth hundreds of millions. He funded SailGP, a high-speed racing league that attracted celebrities like Anne Hathaway and Kylian Mbappé. He nearly died surfing in 1992 but came back for more. He revived Indian Wells tennis tournament and called it the “fifth Grand Slam.” Excess appears to be his natural state.

On the other side: he exercises for hours daily, drinks only water and green tea, maintains an obsessively strict diet, and has been described as “20 years younger than his peers” at 81. His discipline is legendary among Silicon Valley executives.

The paradox? Both are true. Ellison’s self-discipline funds his adventures. His physical regimen enables his risk-taking. At an age when most billionaires fade into yacht retirement, he’s still hunting the next wave—literal and metaphorical.

Marriage Number Five: The Quiet Wedding That Shocked Everyone

In 2024, an obscure University of Michigan donation document revealed the news: Larry Ellison had quietly married Jolin Zhu, a Chinese-American woman born in Shenyang who graduated from Michigan. The age gap—47 years—immediately sparked internet commentary. Some called it eccentric; others called it on-brand for a man who’s never followed conventional rules.

His four previous marriages had all ended in divorce. But with Jolin Zhu as his spouse, Ellison added another chapter to a personal life that has always been as headline-grabbing as his business ventures. The joke on social media practically wrote itself: “Ellison loves surfing and dating equally—he just can’t stay committed to either for long.”

The Family Empire Expands Beyond Silicon Valley

While Ellison built the database kingdom, his son David Ellison was plotting a different conquest: Hollywood. In a stunning $8 billion acquisition, David took control of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS and MTV. The Ellison family invested $6 billion of their own capital, marking their debut as serious media moguls.

Two generations. Two empires. One legacy. The father conquered Silicon Valley and enterprise software; the son is now shaping entertainment. Together, they’ve created something rare: a tech-to-media dynasty that spans both the digital infrastructure and the content that runs on it.

Political Influence: Wealth Converted to Power

Ellison’s influence extends beyond markets into politics. A long-time Republican donor, he’s funded presidential campaigns (Marco Rubio in 2015) and Super PACs ($15 million to Tim Scott in 2022). Most recently, in January 2025, he appeared at the White House alongside SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman to announce a monumental $500 billion AI data center project. Oracle’s technology sits at the core—a deal that represents commercial ambition and geopolitical positioning in equal measure.

Philanthropy on His Own Terms

Ellison signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, committing to donate 95% of his wealth. But unlike Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, he doesn’t do the celebrity philanthropist circuit. In a New York Times interview, he explained: “I cherish my solitude and refuse to be influenced by outside ideas.”

His giving reflects this philosophy. He donated $200 million to USC for cancer research. More recently, he’s directing funds toward the Ellison Institute of Technology (a joint venture with Oxford University) to tackle healthcare, food systems, and clean energy. His philanthropic vision is deeply personal, uncompromised by trends or peer pressure.

The Unfinished Story

At 81, Larry Ellison finally wears the crown of world’s richest man. He’s lived through Silicon Valley’s birth, survived the dot-com crash, watched the cloud computing revolution from the sidelines, and positioned himself perfectly for the AI explosion. He’s been married five times, nearly died in pursuit of adventure, and maintained an iron discipline that would shame most billionaires half his age.

The title of world’s richest man may rotate again—it always does. But what won’t change is Ellison’s fingerprint on technology. The database systems that power global commerce, the infrastructure now supporting AI, the sporting leagues that bear his vision, the media empire his son is building—these are his legacy.

He’s the defining figure of an older generation of tech titans who refused to fade. Stubborn, competitive, uncompromising. At an age when most men are writing memoirs, Ellison is still writing history.