How 81-Year-Old Larry Ellison Reclaimed the World's Richest Title—And His Fifth Wife's Role in His Personal Transformation

The Unexpected Moment: When Oracle Became AI’s Kingmaker

The morning of September 10, 2025, marked a dramatic shift in the billionaire rankings. Oracle’s stock surged over 40% in a single trading session—its largest one-day jump since 1992—following the announcement of a staggering $300 billion, five-year partnership with OpenAI. This explosive move propelled 81-year-old Larry Ellison past Elon Musk as the world’s wealthiest individual, with his net worth peaking at $393 billion. For a man who built his empire on enterprise databases rather than consumer flashiness, this victory carried a special significance: it was vindication for betting on infrastructure over trends.

What makes this wealth surge remarkable isn’t just the number. It represents Oracle’s spectacular pivot from a “traditional software vendor”—once trailing far behind Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure in the cloud wars—to a dark horse power player in AI infrastructure. The company that many tech insiders had written off in the cloud computing race has now positioned itself as a critical backbone for the generative AI explosion.

From Poverty to Programming: The Accidental Founding of a Database Dynasty

Larry Ellison’s journey defies the Silicon Valley playbook. Born in 1944 in New York’s Bronx to a teenage unmarried mother, he was adopted at nine months by a middle-class Chicago family. His adoptive father held a modest government position; money was always tight. Though Ellison attended the University of Illinois, he abandoned his studies during sophomore year following his adoptive mother’s death. A later attempt at the University of Chicago lasted merely one semester.

Rather than viewing his dropout status as failure, Ellison treated it as liberation. He drifted across America, taking freelance programming gigs in Chicago before gravitating toward Berkeley, California—a counterculture paradise teeming with technological experimentation. “People there seemed freer and smarter,” he would later recall. This restless searching ended in the early 1970s when he landed at Ampex Corporation as a programmer. There, working on a classified CIA database project (code-named “Oracle”), Ellison experienced the eureka moment: while others saw databases as academic curiosities, he recognized their staggering commercial potential.

By 1977, 32-year-old Ellison joined forces with colleagues Bob Miner and Ed Oates, pooling just $2,000 to launch Software Development Laboratories. They developed a commercial relational database system and called it Oracle. The bet paid off spectacularly. The 1986 NASDAQ IPO transformed Oracle into an enterprise software powerhouse, and Ellison became the visionary who monetized what others only theorized about.

The Ellison Era: Rebellion, Reinvention, and Resilience

Famously combative and obsessively competitive, Ellison held nearly every leadership role at Oracle over four decades. He served as president (1978-1996), chairman (1990-1992), and CEO through multiple cycles of triumph and struggle. A 1992 surfing accident nearly killed him—a brush with mortality that merely reinforced his appetite for intensity rather than tempering it.

Oracle’s stock trajectory mirrors Ellison’s personal arc: periods of dominance punctuated by near-extinction. The company dominated enterprise databases but faltered initially in the cloud computing shift. Yet through strategic patience and an unshakeable belief in enterprise relationships, Oracle kept itself relevant. When the AI infrastructure wave arrived in 2024-2025, the company—now under new leadership but still guided by Ellison’s strategic vision as Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer—was positioned to capitalize.

The Personal Side: Discipline Meets Indulgence

The contradiction between Ellison’s ascetic practices and his lavish lifestyle is striking. He owns roughly 98% of Hawaii’s Lanai island, multiple California estates, and world-class yachts. Yet he reportedly abstains from sugary beverages, consuming only water and green tea, while maintaining a grueling daily exercise regimen that former executives describe as “monastic.” At 81, he maintains the physical vitality of someone two decades younger—a feat he credits entirely to ruthless self-discipline.

Beyond athletics, Ellison has pursued an eclectic portfolio of passions: reviving the Indian Wells tennis tournament, founding the high-speed catamaran racing league SailGP (which now counts actress Anne Hathaway and football superstar Mbappé among its backers), and orchestrating Oracle Team USA’s legendary America’s Cup comeback in 2013.

His romantic history, however, has been considerably less disciplined. Previously married four times, Ellison married his fifth wife, Jolin Zhu, in 2024—news that emerged quietly through a University of Michigan donation document. Born in Shenyang, China, and educated at Michigan, Zhu is 47 years Ellison’s junior. The coupling sparked internet humor about Ellison’s apparent inability to resist either wave action or romantic conquest. Yet the marriage signals something deeper: even at 81, he remains unwilling to accept conventional limitations. His choice of a much younger, internationally connected partner mirrors his broader life philosophy—break the rules, ignore the spreadsheets, live expansively.

Empire Expansion: From Silicon Valley to Hollywood

Ellison’s wealth has evolved beyond personal accumulation into dynastic infrastructure. His son, David Ellison, orchestrated the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global (parent to CBS and MTV), with $6 billion funded by the Ellison family office. This move planted the family flag in entertainment, creating a two-generation empire spanning technology (the father’s domain) and media (the son’s conquest).

Politically, Ellison has been an active Republican donor, having financed Marco Rubio’s 2015 presidential campaign and contributed $15 million to Tim Scott’s 2022 Super PAC. 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 network crystallized his transition from business titan to power broker. Oracle technology will anchor this infrastructure, blending commerce with political influence.

Giving on His Own Terms

In 2010, Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate at least 95% of his wealth. Unlike Gates or Buffett, he refuses to march in lockstep with peer philanthropists. He “cherishes solitude,” according to a New York Times profile, and “resists outside influence.” His 2016 gift of $200 million to USC for cancer research and his recent pivot toward the Ellison Institute of Technology—a joint venture with Oxford targeting healthcare, agriculture, and climate challenges—reveal a man designing philanthropy according to his own specifications, not committee consensus.

The Final Act: How the Prodigal Son Became the Richest Man

At 81, Larry Ellison has achieved something rarer than wealth accumulation—he’s orchestrated a relevance cycle that defies aging industry narratives. The man who recognized database value when the industry dismissed it has now positioned Oracle as the central nervous system for AI infrastructure. His marriage to a woman 47 years his junior, his continued dominance of sporting pursuits, his refusal to retire or fade—all signal that Ellison interprets age differently than most.

The world’s richest title may rotate again. Technology cycles are ruthless. But in 2025, Ellison has demonstrated that the old guard of tech moguls haven’t exhausted their capacity for disruption. He remains the Silicon Valley outsider who forced his way in, stayed longer than expected, and is now betting that infrastructure—not applications, not platforms, but the raw computational muscle beneath them all—will determine the next era of value creation. For now, he’s winning.