zlacker

Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year.

For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia…

Oracle?!

“On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion.

In June 2020, Ellison was reported to be the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $66.8 billion”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

>>jodrel+(OP)
He still owns over 40% of Oracle, that's a much bigger equity stake than most founders, and most of these other trillion-dollar companies don't have founders in charge anymore.

>>jodrel+(OP)
Everyone else is too busy spending everything they have on GPUs, DRAM and power plants?

Joking. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me more than seeing Larry Ellison at the top of the list, is seeing Netflix buying Warner Bros, and not the other way around. Maybe I'm too old, but the very notion somehow does not compute.

>>jodrel+(OP)
In addition to Oracle, he owns 1.5% of Tesla and 77% of Skydance/Paramount but those are <10% of the value of his Oracle stake.

>>TeMPOr+I2
Yeah, that headline struck me as backwards too, but I acknowledge it's based on an old framework that doesn't match the modern facts.

P.S. punished for what, honest self-deprecation? By "it" I meant my expectation, not the headline ... is that really not clear?

>>jodrel+(OP)
People don't seem to realize that Oracle is deep in the AI play, taking on a bunch of debt to make speculative leases and buildout of datacenters to rent to other players.

It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.

>>jodrel+(OP)
Oracle is still the company that does database for everyone with money to spend, and the percentage of companies (and governments, and NGOs) that discover a meaningful percentage of their very purpose is "moving data around" only grows over time. Their market is essentially constrained to "entities that use computers and want to sort data," which may as well be unconstrained. And in spite of all the ways they can be criticized, they still compete at the top of their game; many cheaper or free alternatives are going to ask you to trade a lot of labor (and added risk of data loss and destruction).

In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted,

- Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin

- Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!).

- Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings.

- AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially)

- SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space)

- Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking.

- Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money.

No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.

>>TeMPOr+I2
It felt the same way when AOL bought Time Warner.

>>hatefu+47
In business, it's sometimes more about people's expectations for a company's future than their past performance.

We must never assume the market is rational, and enough people getting hyped at the same time can give a company enough short-term cash to make an unexpected move.

>>mNovak+E4
> Oracle will be the first to freeze

one can hope

>>unsui+Bb
Will this somehow liberate ZFS?

>>jodrel+(OP)
It's a combination of the over-valuation of Oracle - popping on the late stage of the AI bubble - and Ellison owning so much of Oracle.

Even after the recent drop, Oracle is trading for ~33 times last four quarters operating income. With their meh growth rate, fair value is closer to half that. Except we're in an AI bubble. Oracle is riding the tail of the AI bubble just as they popped to the moon toward the end of the dotcom bubble. Oracle will contract afterward accordingly. The stock probably won't see this era's highs again for another 20 years, if ever.

>>xattt+Jc
It’ll just make their auditors and legal team desperate for money, which is kinda horrifying to consider.

>>MikeCa+42
Back when he was in competition with Gates for #1, I recall him changing his contract so he was getting paid in stock options instead of salary so he could get rich faster.

>>xattt+Jc
How does ZFS need to be liberated?

>>jodrel+(OP)
He also really doesn't do much (almost any?) charity so far in his life. And he never had to split assets in a divorce. So he's like a dung beetle of money.

>>mNovak+E4
Isn’t that all from the one OpenAI deal they made 5 months ago?

>>jodrel+(OP)
being the tech industry's conduit to the US president pays well.

>>george+rh
dung beetle of *wealth

Which is kinda irrelevant. Him selling Oracle shares does not fundamentally change the world in any way. Sure you can say "he should sell shares and do charity", but you could make the same argument that whoever would be buying those shares could be doing charity instead.

>>jodrel+(OP)
oracle cloud is a thing and it has some pretty big customers

>>george+rh
"Larry Ellison has been involved with two philanthropic organizations. First he made a $300M donation to Stanford, in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal. All other philanthropic work is to the Larry Ellison institute for prolonging of life--namely his." -- Bryan Cantrill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

>>shadow+L6
> "Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free)"

Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup.

Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side.

Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years??

> "Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful"

Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet.

[1] https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-...

>>george+rh
He's been divorced five times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison#Marriages

But I guess with the first one having ended pre-Oracle, he's had a pretty solid pre-nup ever since.

>>eirikb+Kn
Funny death is the equalizer for now till you get the foundation situation

>>mNovak+E4
Random but this is a very well written line:

> It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.

Kudos

>>throw0+mh
They took the entire Solaris code back to proprietary source and kept improving ZFS themselves. For instance, they added encryption.

>>eirikb+Kn
Sounds like he is a refreshingly honest person

>>george+rh
He did buy an entire island in Hawaii and makes it a decent place for the natives (from what I hear) but otherwise...

Billionaire Drools That “Citizens Will Be on Their Best Behavior” Under Constant AI Surveillance

https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-survei...

Is the kind of mindset behind this guy.

>>admiss+2q
Sounds like he’s a twat.

>>jodrel+Do
Oracle had $57 billion in revenue in 2025, up 8% from last year. You do make the excellent observation that it's not as high or spiky as other tech companies. It is, however, consistent, and they've been at it much longer than most on the list (founded 1977).

That last fact probably matters most regarding Ellison's fortune. Their "boring IBM style thing" continues to grow, slowly, and continues to make him money (a lot of it, given his continually-owned large stake); even if the velocity isn't as high as other billionaires, he started a lot earlier than they did.

> Why does anyone other than the government give them money?

I asked a similar question of a relative who was all-in on Microsoft in the '90s. His response was simple: "reliability and expectation of business-oriented service." When a company's been around since 1977, there's more trust they'll be around 10 years out. Oracle is many things, but it's not a company with a notorious "killed by" list of abandoned critical projects that other companies were relying upon to prop their revenue streams. And, if you spend enough money with them, they tend to put someone on helping you solve your problems to keep your business; this is something the alternatives do as well, but Oracle's seen a lot more business problems and has a big portfolio of past solutions that worked.

I got to be a fly on the wall at one of the FAANGs transitioning off an Oracle DB, and the process took about 3x longer than scoped. The reason? Conservative decisionmaking: all the money flowed through the Oracle DBs, and you cannot screw with the money flow. This goes beyond the need for a business to make revenue; failing to properly track your money flow can put you out of compliance with financial laws and make people go to jail. They trusted their in-house databases for tracking user PII, for keeping the core services running, for doing internal infrastructure monitoring and employee recordkeeping... It took convincing to get every stakeholder to trust it with the money.

Companies buy in with Oracle because they have some confidence they won't go to jail for doing so.

>>admiss+2q
Honest doesn't make good.

>>jodrel+Do
The government has so much money, what need does Oracle have of anybody else's?

Furthermore, what money the government doesn't itself have, it can pressure others into spending, on occasion. e.g. that Bytedance/Oracle deal

>>jodrel+Do
It took Amazon like 10 years to get off Oracle didnt it? Amazon is a tech company where tech is the product and so has lots of internal expertise.

It is like banks trying to get off mainframes, they just cant do it organizationally and there are loads of failed attempts both public and private. I imagine most companies using Oracle are like that.

>>jen729+Wq
Isn't falling for virtue signalling charity donations more of a twattery?

>>admiss+xs
If you choose to classify all charity donations as "virtue signaling", yes.

If you reject that absurd false framing, no.

>>admiss+xs
It is always enlightening when people criticizing "virtue signaling" accidentally reveal that the problem they have is not the signaling, it's the having virtue.

>>erikpu+n4
That's interesting, from his Wikipedia page:

"Ellison was married to Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986.[92] Boothe was a former receptionist at Oracle (RSI at the time).[93] They had two children, David and Megan, who were (as of 2024) film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively"

So he bought studios so his kids could make movies

>>throw0+mh
There is debate as to whether the FreeZFS license (CDDL) is compatible with the GPL, which is why FreeZFS is not part of the Linux Kernel. Some distros are baking it in, but there has long been concern about if merging it violates the license or not.

>>george+rh
This is completely misleading.

Even a cursory google search will give a rather long list:

- Giving Pledge: Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. Recently, he announced plans to donate 95% of his $373 billion fortune, focusing on science, healthcare, climate change, and AI research.

- Ellison Medical Foundation: Invested nearly $1 billion in biomedical research on aging and disease prevention before closing in 2013

- Lawrence Ellison Foundation: Supports research on aging, health, education, sustainable agriculture, and wildlife conservation.

- Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine (USC): Established with a $200 million donation to advance cancer research and personalized therapies

- Ellison Institute of Technology (Oxford): A for-profit philanthropic initiative tackling global challenges like healthcare, food insecurity, climate change, and AI. A new campus worth $1.3 billion is planned for 2027

- Significant funding for Oxford University through EIT partnerships, including scholarships and research programs.

- Lion Country Safari Acquisition: Purchased the 254-acre wildlife sanctuary in Florida for $30 million through his foundation, ensuring continued conservation efforts.

- Larry Ellison Conservation Center: Opened in California to rehabilitate and breed endangered species

I'm not a huge fan of his or how Oracle has conducted business, but his giving represents billions to charity, not exactly fitting for the "dung beetle" label people are so quick to apply to him.

>>admiss+xs
It's not virtue signally if you're tangible helping people. Like if I give away food, maybe I have the intent of signalling something, but I'm also giving away food. That actually happened.

The world would be a much better place if rich people virtue signalled much more and thereby donated more.

>>eirikb+Kn
It's amusing but it's not true. From Wikipedia:

> In 1992, Ellison shattered his elbow in a high-speed bicycle crash. After receiving treatment at University of California, Davis, Ellison donated $5 million to seed the Lawrence J. Ellison Musculo-Skeletal Research Center.

> In 1998, the Lawrence J. Ellison Ambulatory Care Center opened on the Sacramento campus of the UC Davis Medical Center

> In 2007, Ellison pledged $500,000 to fortify a community centre in Sderot, Israel, against rocket attacks

> In 2014, he donated $10 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

> In 2017, he donated $16.6 million donation to support the construction of well-being facilities on a new campus for co-ed conscripts

> In May 2016, Ellison donated $200 million to the University of Southern California to establish a cancer research center: the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC

> Between 2021 and 2023, Ellison invested $130 million in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and has pledged a further $218 million since then

>>admiss+2q
> in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal

>> Refreshing honest

?

>>slg+mu
There was a time when one of the virtues was not to brag about how virtuous you were. I think that's why a lot of folks have a problem with virtue signalling. In their minds if you're signalling by doing something publicly it karmically negates what you're doing and almost alchemically turns it into something resembling vice.

I'm merely trying to explain how it is that people can have a problem with virtue signalling and to them it doesn't really contradict what is to them true virtue where you do something good and stay quiet about it.

>>jodrel+(OP)
The richest person must be a natural person, not a company. These are large companies but their shareholding is spread out. The lawnmower owns 40% of Oracle.

>>burnin+4A
So he has pledged to give away 95%. But so far it seems like he has given very little, maybe 1%?

>>burnin+4A
Yeah I don't know why people shame dung beetles with association to him

>>xattt+Jc
It could make it worse. IP from companies that got chopped up and sold for parts can be a nightmare. You may have to do deals with multiple parties, and it can be unclear who owns what (even to the potential owners themselves).

>>tosti+Sp
Even if Oracle evaporated and their contemporary ZFS source became unencumbered, I doubt OpenZFS would want to try and merge significantly parts. They already have their own encryption implementation for example.

>>msandf+cB
This comment feels like it was made outside the context of the existing conversation. The comment I replied to was calling all charity virtue signaling and not just vocal giving.

But either way, I personally don’t think a library is any less valuable to a community just because it has Carnegie’s name above the entrance.

>>jodrel+Do
> Oracle sell an RDBMS

Businesses Oracle is in:

- Databases (several)

- Cloud

- Software for planning everything related to manufacturing and logistics (ERP, supply chain management)

- Software for customer relationship management (CRM)

- Software for healthcare, managing hospitals and clinics

- Software for managing every aspect of running a bank

- Point of sale equipment

- Software for running utility companies

- Software for everything people related inside companies (payroll, HR, hiring, etc)

- Competing with Red Hat on commercial Linux

- Programming languages (several)

- Software for managing inventories

And a gazillion other things.

>>jodrel+CA
You listed multiple sociopathic stuff. A western hegemony think tank is not a good thing. Giving money to a genociders is the opposite of good.

>>skinny+DH
Nobody claimed otherwise. The claim was that he gave money to nothing except his own life extension fund. And you agree that he's given money to other things.

>>burnin+4A
Pledging and giving are not the same thing.

>>hamand+dD
So according to you there's some magical formula for when he has to give it all away? If you were him, wouldn't you want a lasting legacy? Something that your wealth effects generations over decades or even a century?

Also, keep in mind he's already given away over $2B in charity, but even at 1%, that's still not very much for you?

>>jodrel+CA
Note that I made that claim in 2011. I had tried to research this a bit for the brief period of time that I was at Oracle, and really couldn't find anything (other than the Ellison Medical Foundation). That said, I think my essential assertion stands: given his wealth, Ellison's philanthropic work is de minimis.

>>burnin+LN
Yeah I would say 1% is not very much, even if it is $2bn. In fact, it's less because it's $2bn. Him giving 95% of his wealth away would affect his lifestyle about as much as most people giving 1% of their wealth away. Probably less. Him giving 1% away is completely insignificant.

I guess you could argue he can't give away 95% now because he wants to maintain control of Oracle... which is fair enough I guess. But still, 1% is not very much.

>>burnin+LN
I don't understand how people can defend extremely wealthy sociopaths. He's a CIA contractor and a genocide supporter, and he's trying to consolidate media to censor certain narratives. The guy is a piece of work. And there's no way he contributed that much more than everyone else to capture most of the wealth generated by the work of his employees. Being more of an aggressive sociopath doesn't mean you did more or better work than everyone else in his orgs.

>>burnin+LN
My only point is that the parent post wasn't being misleading. No, 1% isn't much.

>>jodrel+CI
Ah I see my mistake. I had noticed grandparent being about charity and was responding to that.

>>colord+t91
Boo hoo.

Misinformation is misinformation and it does no one good.

>>jodrel+CA
These numbers are rounding errors to Ellison. I give a higher percentage of my net worth every year than he has in total

>>inemes+Bl1
You must be talking about yourself, everything I said is easily verifiable with 30 seconds of research. Do some introspection - you are projecting.

>>hamand+dD
Most of that is clearly going to his own charities for tax benefits.

>>msandf+cB
Society providing incentives for rich people to give money to charitable causes is good actually. An evil person doing good things for selfish reasons is still doing good things.

>>skinny+sl1
It depends on your definition of "charity". If you're talking about Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Wikipedia says:

>The organization states that it is the official U.S. charity authorized to collect donations for IDF soldiers.

>Charity evaluators have generally rated the organization favorably.[9]

>The organization is recognized as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity in the United States and has been tax-exempt since July 1983.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Israel_Defense_...

>>bootsm+732
The real problem comes when you look up what charity actually does with the money.

It is hard to not get the feeling that outside of the local food bank, most charities are a type of money making scam when you dig into what they do with the money.