There’s been some change on the podium of the world’s richest people this fall. Businessman Larry Ellison has overtaken Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault to rise to third place in the Forbes billionaires ranking. At 80, the American is now at the head of a fortune of 191.7 billion dollars. But who is he? Yahoo introduces him.
Co-founder of Oracle
Less known to the general public than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, more moderate than current Space X CEO Elon Musk, Larry Ellison is not uninteresting. While the American billionaire has already dominated the podium of the richest people in the past, he took advantage of Oracle’s good performance on the stock market to enrich himself by $18 billion this week, according to figures collected by Forbes.
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Founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, the company has grown over time into one of the largest providers of enterprise software in the world. After building the small start-up into a tech giant, Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO of the group in 2014, a position he had held for three decades. This iconic Silicon Valley figure remained Oracle’s chairman of the board and chief technology officer.
Very close to Steve Jobs, he tried to buy Apple
Everyone has forgotten it today, but Apple nearly went bankrupt in the mid-90s. To save the Apple brand, Larry Ellison offered his long-time friend Steve Jobs, who had been ousted from the company, to buy Apple in 1995, which was valued at “only” five billion dollars at the time. “We both had good credit, and I had arranged to borrow money. All Steve had to do was say yes,” revealed the Oracle co-founder in a 2016 speech reported by the Silicon website. The rest is history. Steve Jobs declined the offer and made a comeback in 1997 via the acquisition of his company NeXT by Apple.
Not holding a grudge for a penny and still very close to Steve Jobs until his death at the end of 2011, Larry Ellison promised difficult years for the Cupertino company without its iconic boss. “I have a lot of respect for this company, I have a lot of respect for Tim Cook, but I’ll say it again: Steve is irreplaceable,” he assured in 2012 on American television. “We’ve all lost something. He was our Edison, he was our Picasso. There’s no one like him. Apple will continue to prosper, but not like when Steve was there,” he added. Apple’s bright future has rather proven him wrong.
A difficult childhood
To say that Larry Ellison was born with a silver spoon in his mouth would be a lie. Born in 1944 in the Bronx, New York, he was not raised by his natural parents. His mother, a young single woman, entrusted him to an aunt and uncle couple, with whom he grew up in a poor suburb of Chicago. But his destiny was not to remain on the shores of Lake Michigan. He abandoned “the region as well as his studies in California in the late 1960s. His ambition did not evaporate with the discovery of hippie pleasures”, Les Échos recounts. Very quickly passionate about computers, “two colleagues and $1,200” were enough for him to found Oracle in 1977.
The Prince of Lanai
A real estate tycoon, the billionaire, a great lover of Japan, owns several properties around the world but also Lanai, the smallest inhabited island of Hawaii. He owns 98% of the island after writing a check for $300 million in 2012. “He owns the hotels as well as most of the businesses and homes on these paradise lands where he reigns as ‘lord’,” writes Bloomberg Businessweek. On this small piece of land, the billionaire has taken over the businesses, hotels and almost all of the infrastructure on the island.
