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Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year. For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Micro

Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year. For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia… Oracle?! “On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion. In June 2020, Ellison was reported to be the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $66.8 billion” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

immibis 11mo ago
The richest person must be a natural person, not a company. These are large companies but their shareholding is spread out. The lawnmower owns 40% of Oracle.
MikeCapone 11mo ago
He still owns over 40% of Oracle, that's a much bigger equity stake than most founders, and most of these other trillion-dollar companies don't have founders in charge anymore.
- hinkley 11mo ago
  Back when he was in competition with Gates for #1, I recall him changing his contract so he was getting paid in stock options instead of salary so he could get rich faster.
TeMPOraL 11mo ago
Everyone else is too busy spending everything they have on GPUs, DRAM and power plants? Joking. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me more than seeing Larry Ellison at the top of the list, is seeing Netflix buying Warner Bros, and not the other way around. Maybe I'm too old, but the very notion somehow does not compute.
- jibal 11mo ago
  Yeah, that headline struck me as backwards too, but I acknowledge it's based on an old framework that doesn't match the modern facts. P.S. punished for what, honest self-deprecation? By "it" I meant my expectation, not the headline ... is that really not clear?
- hateful 11mo ago
  It felt the same way when AOL bought Time Warner.
  - shadowgovt 11mo ago
    In business, it's sometimes more about people's expectations for a company's future than their past performance. We must never assume the market is rational, and enough people getting hyped at the same time can give a company enough short-term cash to make an unexpected move.
erikpukinskis 11mo ago
In addition to Oracle, he owns 1.5% of Tesla and 77% of Skydance/Paramount but those are <10% of the value of his Oracle stake.
- wonderwonder 11mo ago
  That's interesting, from his Wikipedia page: "Ellison was married to Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986.[92] Boothe was a former receptionist at Oracle (RSI at the time).[93] They had two children, David and Megan, who were (as of 2024) film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively" So he bought studios so his kids could make movies
mNovak 11mo ago
People don't seem to realize that Oracle is deep in the AI play, taking on a bunch of debt to make speculative leases and buildout of datacenters to rent to other players. It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.
- unsui 11mo ago
  > Oracle will be the first to freeze one can hope
  - xattt 11mo ago
    Will this somehow liberate ZFS?
    - legitronics 11mo ago
      It’ll just make their auditors and legal team desperate for money, which is kinda horrifying to consider.
    - throw0101d 11mo ago
      How does ZFS need to be liberated?
      - tosti 11mo ago
        They took the entire Solaris code back to proprietary source and kept improving ZFS themselves. For instance, they added encryption.
        johncolanduoni 11mo ago
        Even if Oracle evaporated and their contemporary ZFS source became unencumbered, I doubt OpenZFS would want to try and merge significantly parts. They already have their own encryption implementation for example.
        11mo ago
shadowgovt 11mo ago
Oracle is still the company that does database for everyone with money to spend, and the percentage of companies (and governments, and NGOs) that discover a meaningful percentage of their very purpose is "moving data around" only grows over time. Their market is essentially constrained to "entities that use computers and want to sort data," which may as well be unconstrained. And in spite of all the ways they can be criticized, they still compete at the top of their game; many cheaper or free alternatives are going to ask you to trade a lot of labor (and added risk of data loss and destruction). In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted, - Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin - Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!). - Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings. - AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially) - SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space) - Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. - Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money. No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.
- jodrellblank 11mo ago
  > "Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free)" Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup. Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side. Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years?? > "Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful" Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet. [1] https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-oracle/ https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-...
adventured 11mo ago
It's a combination of the over-valuation of Oracle - popping on the late stage of the AI bubble - and Ellison owning so much of Oracle. Even after the recent drop, Oracle is trading for ~33 times last four quarters operating income. With their meh growth rate, fair value is closer to half that. Except we're in an AI bubble. Oracle is riding the tail of the AI bubble just as they popped to the moon toward the end of the dotcom bubble. Oracle will contract afterward accordingly. The stock probably won't see this era's highs again for another 20 years, if ever.
georgeecollins 11mo ago
He also really doesn't do much (almost any?) charity so far in his life. And he never had to split assets in a divorce. So he's like a dung beetle of money.
- fastball 11mo ago
  dung beetle of *wealth Which is kinda irrelevant. Him selling Oracle shares does not fundamentally change the world in any way. Sure you can say "he should sell shares and do charity", but you could make the same argument that whoever would be buying those shares could be doing charity instead.
- eirikbakke 11mo ago
  "Larry Ellison has been involved with two philanthropic organizations. First he made a $300M donation to Stanford, in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal. All other philanthropic work is to the Larry Ellison institute for prolonging of life--namely his." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
  - ge96 11mo ago
    Funny death is the equalizer for now till you get the foundation situation
  - admissionsguy 11mo ago
    Sounds like he is a refreshingly honest person
    - jen729w 11mo ago
      Sounds like he’s a twat.
      - admissionsguy 11mo ago
        Isn't falling for virtue signalling charity donations more of a twattery?
notatoad 11mo ago
being the tech industry's conduit to the US president pays well.
ndjeosibfb 11mo ago
oracle cloud is a thing and it has some pretty big customers
dang 11mo ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161166.

immibis 11mo ago

The richest person must be a natural person, not a company. These are large companies but their shareholding is spread out. The lawnmower owns 40% of Oracle.

MikeCapone 11mo ago

He still owns over 40% of Oracle, that's a much bigger equity stake than most founders, and most of these other trillion-dollar companies don't have founders in charge anymore.

hinkley 11mo ago
Back when he was in competition with Gates for #1, I recall him changing his contract so he was getting paid in stock options instead of salary so he could get rich faster.

TeMPOraL 11mo ago

Everyone else is too busy spending everything they have on GPUs, DRAM and power plants? Joking. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me more than seeing Larry Ellison at the top of the list, is seeing Netflix buying Warner Bros, and not the other way around. Maybe I'm too old, but the very notion somehow does not compute.

jibal 11mo ago
Yeah, that headline struck me as backwards too, but I acknowledge it's based on an old framework that doesn't match the modern facts. P.S. punished for what, honest self-deprecation? By "it" I meant my expectation, not the headline ... is that really not clear?
hateful 11mo ago
It felt the same way when AOL bought Time Warner.
- shadowgovt 11mo ago
  In business, it's sometimes more about people's expectations for a company's future than their past performance. We must never assume the market is rational, and enough people getting hyped at the same time can give a company enough short-term cash to make an unexpected move.

erikpukinskis 11mo ago

In addition to Oracle, he owns 1.5% of Tesla and 77% of Skydance/Paramount but those are <10% of the value of his Oracle stake.

wonderwonder 11mo ago
That's interesting, from his Wikipedia page: "Ellison was married to Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986.[92] Boothe was a former receptionist at Oracle (RSI at the time).[93] They had two children, David and Megan, who were (as of 2024) film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively" So he bought studios so his kids could make movies

mNovak 11mo ago

People don't seem to realize that Oracle is deep in the AI play, taking on a bunch of debt to make speculative leases and buildout of datacenters to rent to other players. It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.

unsui 11mo ago
> Oracle will be the first to freeze one can hope
- xattt 11mo ago
  Will this somehow liberate ZFS?
  - legitronics 11mo ago
    It’ll just make their auditors and legal team desperate for money, which is kinda horrifying to consider.
  - throw0101d 11mo ago
    How does ZFS need to be liberated?
    - tosti 11mo ago
      They took the entire Solaris code back to proprietary source and kept improving ZFS themselves. For instance, they added encryption.
      - johncolanduoni 11mo ago
        Even if Oracle evaporated and their contemporary ZFS source became unencumbered, I doubt OpenZFS would want to try and merge significantly parts. They already have their own encryption implementation for example.
      - 11mo ago

shadowgovt 11mo ago

Oracle is still the company that does database for everyone with money to spend, and the percentage of companies (and governments, and NGOs) that discover a meaningful percentage of their very purpose is "moving data around" only grows over time. Their market is essentially constrained to "entities that use computers and want to sort data," which may as well be unconstrained. And in spite of all the ways they can be criticized, they still compete at the top of their game; many cheaper or free alternatives are going to ask you to trade a lot of labor (and added risk of data loss and destruction). In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted, - Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin - Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!). - Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings. - AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially) - SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space) - Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. - Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money. No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.

jodrellblank 11mo ago
> "Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free)" Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup. Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side. Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years?? > "Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful" Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet. [1] https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-oracle/ https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-...

adventured 11mo ago

It's a combination of the over-valuation of Oracle - popping on the late stage of the AI bubble - and Ellison owning so much of Oracle. Even after the recent drop, Oracle is trading for ~33 times last four quarters operating income. With their meh growth rate, fair value is closer to half that. Except we're in an AI bubble. Oracle is riding the tail of the AI bubble just as they popped to the moon toward the end of the dotcom bubble. Oracle will contract afterward accordingly. The stock probably won't see this era's highs again for another 20 years, if ever.

georgeecollins 11mo ago

He also really doesn't do much (almost any?) charity so far in his life. And he never had to split assets in a divorce. So he's like a dung beetle of money.

fastball 11mo ago
dung beetle of *wealth Which is kinda irrelevant. Him selling Oracle shares does not fundamentally change the world in any way. Sure you can say "he should sell shares and do charity", but you could make the same argument that whoever would be buying those shares could be doing charity instead.
eirikbakke 11mo ago
"Larry Ellison has been involved with two philanthropic organizations. First he made a $300M donation to Stanford, in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal. All other philanthropic work is to the Larry Ellison institute for prolonging of life--namely his." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
- ge96 11mo ago
  Funny death is the equalizer for now till you get the foundation situation
- admissionsguy 11mo ago
  Sounds like he is a refreshingly honest person
  - jen729w 11mo ago
    Sounds like he’s a twat.
    - admissionsguy 11mo ago
      Isn't falling for virtue signalling charity donations more of a twattery?

notatoad 11mo ago

being the tech industry's conduit to the US president pays well.

ndjeosibfb 11mo ago

oracle cloud is a thing and it has some pretty big customers

dang 11mo ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161166.