Oracle chairman and co-founder Larry Ellison is making moves near the top of the list of the world’s richest people. The tech billionaire recently surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to take over the No. 2 slot, although there is now back-and-forth for the position.
Ellison has an estimated net worth of just over $200 billion as of Wednesday, Sept. 18. But how did he amass such a fortune? Of the Top 10 richest people on the planet, chances are most people could identify the rest of their names or at the very least, know their companies.
Ellison is the chairman and chief technology officer at Oracle. According to the 80–year–old’s biography, he also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar. He founded the tech company back in 1977, and it appears he knew exactly what he was doing.
“I decided on the computer business in college,” the entrepreneur said during an interview with the Academy of Achievement in 1997. “I started working part-time programming. I found that in a very short period of time, I could make more money writing programs than a tenured professor at the University of Chicago was making. And I was a teenager, and I said, ‘This is kind of cool,’ and it was also fun. It was like a big game. It was like working on puzzles. So I enjoyed it. [And] it paid extremely well.”
Oracle made headlines when it made a deal to store TikTok’s U.S. data. It was a concession Chinese parent company ByteDance made to try to prevent TikTok from being banned in the U.S. The move has so far not calmed concerns; TikTok was in court the week of Sept. 15, arguing its case against an app ban.
Like most successful tech companies, in 2024 Oracle is making a huge play in the artificial intelligence space. Ellison said the company is building data centers to meet the booming demand for generative AI.
“So we are literally building the smallest, most portable, most affordable cloud data centers all the way up to 200-megawatt data centers, ideal for training very large language models and keeping them up to date. This AI race is going to go on for a long time,” he said during Oracle’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings call in June.
Oracle announced data partnerships with some of the biggest names in AI, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google. As the AI race ramps up, one major problem in need of a solution is storage. Generative AI requires huge amounts of data for teaching the technology. And that’s where Oracle hopes to step in.