The Man Who Keeps Reinventing Himself: Larry Ellison's Latest Chapter at 81

In September 2025, the tech world witnessed a dramatic wealth shake-up. An 81-year-old programmer-turned-billionaire reclaimed a throne he’d never permanently settled in: the world’s richest person. Larry Ellison’s net worth soared past $393 billion in a single trading day—a $100 billion surge that sent shockwaves through financial markets. Yet this headline barely scratches the surface of who Ellison really is: a restless entrepreneur whose marriage portfolio now rivals his business one, a relentless competitor who nearly died pursuing his hobbies, and a tech visionary who somehow stayed relevant through four decades of market upheaval.

From Abandonment to Ambition: The Origins of a Disruptor

Ellison’s story doesn’t begin in Silicon Valley’s gleaming offices—it begins in poverty and rejection. Born in 1944 to an unmarried teenager in the Bronx, he was surrendered for adoption at nine months. His adoptive household offered little: a struggling government employee father and financial instability that defined his childhood. College, which should have been his escape route, became another false start. He left the University of Illinois during sophomore year after his adoptive mother died, then abandoned the University of Chicago after a single semester.

Rather than spiraling, Ellison drifted—literally driving across America with coding skills and restless ambition. When he landed in Berkeley, California, he found something precious: a community of people who “seemed freer and smarter.” This hunger for liberation and innovation would define everything he built.

The real catalyst came at Ampex Corporation, where Ellison worked as a programmer in the early 1970s. The company was tackling a problem for the Central Intelligence Agency: designing a database system that could manage and query information at unprecedented scale. The project’s codename was “Oracle”—a name that would eventually carry Ellison’s ambitions around the world.

The Database Gamble: From CIA Contract to Global Empire

In 1977, Ellison and two colleagues—Bob Miner and Ed Oates—pooled just $2,000 to launch Software Development Laboratories. Ellison’s contribution was $1,200, a modest bet that transformed everything. They made a calculated decision: take the CIA’s relational database model and commercialize it for business customers. The product? They called it Oracle.

This wasn’t Ellison inventing database technology from scratch. His genius lay elsewhere—he was the first person audacious enough to believe companies would pay for this, and disciplined enough to build a market around it. By 1986, when Oracle hit NASDAQ, it had already begun reshaping enterprise software.

What followed was four decades of Ellison as the company’s ultimate survivor. He cycled through nearly every leadership role: president from 1978 to 1996, chairman from 1990 to 1992. A 1992 surfing accident nearly killed him, but upon recovery, he returned to command Oracle for another decade. When he finally stepped aside as CEO in 2014, his fingerprints remained everywhere as Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer.

The AI Comeback: Why Oracle’s “Late” Entry Mattered

By the 2020s, Oracle seemed like yesterday’s news. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure had dominated cloud computing while Oracle played catch-up. But Ellison’s database legacy contained a hidden advantage: enterprises still needed their data managed, organized, and queried with Oracle’s precision. When the generative AI wave hit, Oracle’s infrastructure for handling massive datasets suddenly became invaluable.

September 2025 proved this thesis spectacularly. Oracle announced a five-year, $300 billion partnership with OpenAI—part of a quarter that included hundreds of billions in new contracts. The stock exploded 40% in a single day, the biggest jump since 1992. While the market swooned over AI’s promise, Oracle positioned itself as essential infrastructure. The company shed thousands of employees from legacy hardware and software divisions while investing heavily in data centers and AI systems.

The narrative shift was seismic: Oracle had transformed from “dying traditional software company” into “dark horse of AI infrastructure.” Ellison’s contrarian positioning—staying profitable in database while others chased cloud’s promises—suddenly looked prescient.

The Personal Portfolio: Marriages, Passions, and Discipline

At 81, Ellison remains a contradiction wrapped in paradoxes. He possesses nearly 98% of Lanai, Hawaii, along with trophy California estates and yachts that few on Earth will ever board. Yet he maintains monastic discipline: exercise for hours daily, water and green tea only, no sugary indulgences. Former executives report seeing him maintain this regimen throughout the 1990s and 2000s, which observers credit for his youthful appearance—looking “20 years younger than peers.”

His personal relationships tell a different story. Five marriages represent five attempts at permanent partnership, each dissolved. Then in 2024, Ellison quietly married Jolin Zhu, a Chinese-American woman 47 years his junior. The news surfaced through a University of Michigan donation announcement listing “Larry Ellison and his wife, Jolin.” Zhu, born in Shenyang and educated at Michigan, became his latest spouse—a marriage that delighted internet observers who joked that Ellison’s enthusiasm for romantic adventures rivaled his love of surfing.

This pattern reveals something deeper: Ellison pursues satisfaction the way he pursues markets—aggressively, without compromise, accepting failure as part of conquest. His spouse choices, like his business ones, follow his own compass, not society’s.

The Adventurer: Sports, Sailing, and Staying Alive

Ellison’s near-death surfing experience in 1992 should have chastened him. Instead, it redirected his adrenaline. He channeled his obsession with water and wind into competitive sailing, becoming Oracle Team USA’s financial champion. In 2013, he funded a historic America’s Cup comeback—one of sailing’s greatest reversals—that crowned Oracle Team USA champions.

The victory didn’t satisfy; it amplified. Ellison founded SailGP in 2018, a high-speed catamaran league that attracted celebrity investors like Anne Hathaway and footballer Mbappé. He resurrected California’s Indian Wells tennis tournament, rebranding it the “fifth Grand Slam.” To Ellison, sports represent more than leisure—they’re his fountain of youth, his competitive laboratory, his proof that 81 isn’t an endpoint.

The Empire Expands: From Silicon Valley to Hollywood

Ellison’s wealth transcends individual achievement. His son, David Ellison, recently acquired Paramount Global (parent of CBS and MTV) for $8 billion, with $6 billion supplied by Ellison family capital. This deal symbolizes generational ambition: father dominates tech infrastructure, son claims entertainment. Together, they’ve created a wealth dynasty spanning technology and media—a modern industrial family.

Politically, Ellison operates as a Republican power player. He financed Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2015, later donating $15 million to Senator Tim Scott’s Super PAC in 2022. Most notably, Ellison appeared at the White House in January 2025 alongside SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion AI data center network, with Oracle technology at its core—a commercial venture that also represents political positioning.

Philanthropy on His Terms

In 2010, Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing 95% of his wealth to charity. But unlike contemporaries Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, he refuses the collaborative philanthropy playbook. He cherishes solitude and resists group influence, preferring to design futures independently.

His giving reflects this: $200 million to USC for cancer research (2016), recent commitments to the Ellison Institute of Technology—a partnership with Oxford focused on healthcare innovation, agricultural systems, and clean energy. His mission statement reads like his autobiography: “We will design lifesaving drugs, build low-cost agricultural systems, develop efficient clean energy.” It’s personal, ambitious, and entirely Ellison.

The Restless Winner

At 81, Larry Ellison finally wears the crown of world’s richest person. The journey from abandoned orphan to Silicon Valley icon to AI infrastructure kingpin required relentless reinvention. Five marriages, a near-death surfing accident, a sporting obsession, a multi-generational wealth empire—none of these derailed his core mission: staying relevant, staying competitive, staying alive at the bleeding edge.

The richest-person ranking will almost certainly change hands again. But Ellison has demonstrated something more durable: in an era where tech fortunes emerge and vanish in years, where yesterday’s giants become today’s footnotes, one man’s database gamble from the 1970s still powers the infrastructure of tomorrow. He’s not just rich—he’s proven that the stubborn, the disciplined, and the willing to reinvent themselves might just be the last ones standing.