The 81-year-old Oracle Corp co-founder and chairman has been omnipresent – playing a role in just about every major business story of the year, from the frenzied artificial intelligence boom (or bubble) to the megadeals that are roiling Hollywood. — AFP
When the year began, a billionaire with close ties to the White House was a lock for the most newsworthy tech titan of 2025. But 12 chaotic months later, Larry Ellison, not Elon Musk, can justifiably lay claim to the title.
The 81-year-old Oracle Corp co-founder and chairman has been omnipresent – playing a role in just about every major business story of the year, from the frenzied artificial intelligence boom (or bubble) to the megadeals that are roiling Hollywood. Oracle even plans to take a stake in TikTok as part of a somewhat tortured plan to help Donald Trump save the popular video app. Along the way, Ellison’s fortune waxed and waned with Oracle’s stock price – a fever line for a volatile era.
The year began with Stargate, perhaps the most audacious data centre project of them all. On Jan 21, a day after Trump’s inauguration, the president appeared at the White House with Ellison, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank Group Corp chief Masayoshi Son to announce a US$500bil (RM2 trillion) plan to build AI infrastructure. Many superlatives were spilled that day – 100,000 jobs! – and some sceptics considered the vast sum aspirational.
Oracle has since embarked on a historic build-out of data centres optimised for AI that’s proceeding faster than some expected. The endeavour caused the company’s cash flow to go negative for the first time since the early 1990s. But Ellison, who famously passed on the cloud computing revolution 15 years ago, is suddenly an AI guy.
In the summer, OpenAI inked a deal worth some US$300bil (RM1.22 trillion) to rent a massive amount of computing from Oracle, setting up the leading AI lab to become Oracle’s largest customer.
Investors swooned in September when Oracle disclosed the full scale of its OpenAI business. Ellison’s net worth jumped US$89bil (RM361bil) in a day to US$388bil (RM1.6 trillion), the largest one-day increase recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That briefly made him the richest person in the world, surpassing Musk.
His ballooning fortune segued nicely with his son David’s aspirations of becoming a Hollywood mogul. In August, David Ellison’s Skydance Media finally closed a deal to win control of Paramount, an acquisition financed largely by Ellison Senior.
Weeks after closing the Paramount deal, David Ellison turned his gaze to Warner Bros. Discovery Inc, offering to take over the home of Batman, Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny. His father offered to help finance the deal and personally pitched Warner Bros. executives.
It was to no avail. Warner Bros. turned down Paramount Skydance’s bid and accepted one from Netflix Inc instead. The younger Ellison replied with a hostile offer – a move his father pulled in the early 2000s to buy software company PeopleSoft. Paramount’s second bid was rejected, with Warner Bros casting doubt the company could deliver on the equity portion of its offer. In response, Larry Ellison agreed to personally guarantee US$40.4bil (RM163.8bil) in financing.
That’s a lot of money, even for him. In recent months, Ellison’s fortune has dwindled – mirroring a slump in Oracle’s share price. Many investors have become sceptical about AI spending in general and consider Oracle especially vulnerable compared with its peers because it has accumulated so much debt to finance its data-center building spree and is counting on OpenAI for a massive chunk of its future business.
Ellison is currently the fifth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of just less than US$250bil (RM1bil). So he has sufficient assets to meet the guarantee many times over. However, his high concentration in Oracle stock means it’s unclear how much cash he’d be able to immediately deploy were he called on to provide the full US$40.4bil backstop, raising the possibility that he might resort to selling stock or pledging additional shares.
Before 2025, Ellison used his money mostly to collect trophies – including planes, sailboats, Malibu real estate and much of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He dabbled in Hollywood by backing his kids’ movies. Now his fortune is tied to the fiercely contested AI market and a still-unproven, debt-laden media company led by his son. – Bloomberg
