WEEKEND READ: Larry Ellison: The $250bn Man Europe Barely Talks About

EBM WEEKEND READ ✍️ By Nick Staunton

For a few hours on 10 September 2025, Larry Ellison was the richest person on Earth. A surge in Oracle’s share price pushed his fortune past Elon Musk’s and briefly above $390 billion — the first time in years anyone had displaced Musk at the top. The moment passed within the day. But it drew attention to a man who, despite forty years at the summit of American business, remains oddly absent from European conversation.

Europe talks constantly about Musk, about Bezos, about the founders of Google. It rarely talks about Ellison. That is strange, because his reach now extends into the places Europe cares about most: the artificial intelligence boom, the ownership of Hollywood, the politics of the Middle East, and the infrastructure of the modern surveillance state. This is an attempt to explain who he is, how he made his money, what he owns, and why he is one of the most controversial billionaires alive.

How much is he worth

The honest answer is that it depends on the hour. Ellison’s wealth is almost entirely tied to Oracle stock, and Oracle has become one of the most volatile large-cap shares on the market as investors reprice it for the AI era. Estimates in 2026 have ranged from roughly $150 billion at the low end to $258 billion on Bloomberg’s measure, with Forbes settling around the low $200 billions for much of the year.

The reason for the spread is simple. Ellison owns about 40% of Oracle — roughly 1.16 billion shares — and almost nothing he owns is diversified. When Oracle moves, his fortune moves with it. A single 5% swing in the share price changes his net worth by more than $11 billion, which is more than most billionaires are worth in total. In September 2025 he gained an estimated $100 billion in a single day, the largest one-day increase in personal wealth ever recorded.

This concentration is deliberate, and it is the key to understanding him. Where most founders sell down over time and spread their money across index funds, property and bonds, Ellison has done the opposite. He has held. As one profile put it, for nearly half a century he has held the shares, held control, and held the risk. That refusal to diversify is why he is periodically the richest man alive, and also why his fortune can fall by tens of billions in an afternoon.

Where the money came from

Ellison did not inherit wealth or finish university. Born in New York in 1944 and raised in Chicago by an aunt and uncle who adopted him, he dropped out of two colleges before teaching himself to program. His break came from an unlikely client: the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the 1970s, working at the technology firm Ampex, Ellison helped build a database for the CIA. The project was codenamed “Oracle.” He saw in it a commercial idea that others had missed — a “relational database,” a way of storing and retrieving information that could be sold to any large organisation. In 1977 he founded the company that would take the project’s name, and for a period the CIA was its only customer.

That idea turned out to be one of the most valuable in the history of software. Every bank, airline, government and retailer needed to store data, and Oracle sold them the means to do it. The company survived a near-bankruptcy in 1990, went public, and grew into the backbone of corporate computing. Ellison ran it as chief executive for 37 years before handing over the title in 2014, though he remains chairman and chief technology officer, and by every account still runs it.

The AI turn, and the Palantir question

Oracle’s recent surge — and Ellison’s return to the top of the rich lists — comes from a single pivot. The company has repositioned itself from a mature software vendor into a supplier of the raw computing power that artificial intelligence requires. Oracle now rents cloud infrastructure to the largest AI developers, including Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and investors have rewarded that shift dramatically.

It is worth correcting a common misconception here. Ellison is often linked to Palantir, the data-analytics company known for its intelligence and defence work. He does not own Palantir and holds no role in it; that company was co-founded by Peter Thiel. The connection is commercial: Palantir runs its systems on Oracle’s cloud, and the two firms have a partnership aimed largely at government and defence customers. Ellison has publicly argued that AI reaches its full value only when it can draw on private, proprietary data rather than the open internet — a view that aligns neatly with Palantir’s business, and with Oracle’s. The relationship is one of shared worldview and shared customers, not ownership.

That worldview matters, because it places Ellison at the centre of a debate Europe is only beginning to have. The race to build the infrastructure of artificial intelligence is now the defining contest in global technology, and Oracle has made itself one of the small number of firms that own the pipes. When OpenAI signs multibillion-dollar deals for computing capacity, Oracle is frequently on the other side of them, part of the same scramble for chips and data-centre capacity now consuming hundreds of billions of dollars.

What else he owns

Outside Oracle, Ellison’s holdings read like a caricature of extreme wealth, and yet each tells you something about him.

He owns roughly 98% of Lānaʻi, the sixth-largest Hawaiian island, bought for about $300 million in 2012. He has since poured money into its hospitality, farming and infrastructure, treating it less as a home than as a private development project. He owns the Indian Wells tennis tournament, one of the most important events outside the Grand Slams. He has spent hundreds of millions on trophy real estate, including estates in Malibu, a Japanese-style compound in Woodside, and a historic Newport mansion.

The most consequential recent addition is media. Through his family trust, Ellison provided the funding for the 2025 merger of Paramount with Skydance, the studio run by his son David. The trust is now the largest shareholder in the combined Paramount Skydance, which controls CBS, film franchises and a large slice of American television. A further move on Warner Bros Discovery, backed by Ellison-family money, would fold in HBO, CNN and the DC and Harry Potter franchises. Separately, Oracle holds a stake of around 15% in the American operations of TikTok.

Put together, this makes the Ellison family one of the most powerful forces in American media at precisely the moment that media is being reshaped. That accumulation, as the concentration of wealth among a handful of American tech founders reaches historic extremes, is beginning to draw the kind of scrutiny once reserved for the oil and railroad barons of a century ago.

The funding of the IDF

Ellison’s philanthropy is substantial — and in one area, politically contested. He is among the most prominent US technology billionaires to have donated heavily to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a US charity that raises funds for programmes supporting Israeli soldiers, veterans and bereaved families.

The donations have been widely reported. In 2014, Ellison was reported to have donated $10m to FIDF, although one contemporaneous report put the figure at $9m. In 2017, he gave $16.6m to support well-being facilities on a new IDF training campus, a gift described at the time as the largest single donation in FIDF’s history. Announcing the gift, Ellison said that since Israel’s founding, “we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home.”

Not all of Ellison’s giving is politically contested. His Giving Pledge letter, signed in 2010, says he had put virtually all his assets into a trust with the intent of giving away at least 95% of his wealth. In 2016, he gave $200m to the University of Southern California to establish the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, focused on cancer research, prevention and treatment. He is also behind the Ellison Institute of Technology’s Oxford project, a reported $1.3bn research campus and partnership focused on health, food security, climate and AI.

The FIDF donations have made him a political lightning rod. Supporters see legitimate philanthropy toward soldiers of a democratic ally. Critics argue that donations to a charity supporting a foreign military’s soldiers carry a different moral weight from ordinary medical or educational philanthropy, particularly during the war in Gaza. A lawsuit revived in 2019 named Ellison among more than 30 pro-Israel defendants accused of aiding alleged war crimes and settlement activity; the case was dismissed again in February 2024. Ellison is also reported to have close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu, who vacationed on Lānaʻi, the Hawaiian island Ellison largely owns. Haaretz reported in 2021 that Ellison offered Netanyahu a seat on Oracle’s board, though that claim should be attributed rather than stated flatly.

EBM takes no position on the political merits of those arguments. But for a European readership, the point is clear: one of the most powerful men in global technology is also a major donor to a US charity supporting the soldiers of a foreign military. That combination is unusual among his Silicon Valley peers, and it belongs in any serious account of his public influence.

Controversial

The IDF funding is only one strand. Ellison’s controversy is broader, and it comes from the way his interests converge.

The first strand is surveillance. Ellison has long argued for more expansive government use of data in the name of security. After the September 2001 attacks, he advocated a national identity-card system backed by biometric information and offered Oracle software free to the US government to help build the database infrastructure. He later argued for a single national-security database that could consolidate information from separate law-enforcement systems. To admirers, that was hard-headed realism about security after 9/11. To critics, it was a blueprint for the surveillance state — advanced by a man whose company specialised in precisely the kind of database architecture such a system would require.

The second strand is politics. Ellison has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent Republican donors and a rare senior technology figure openly aligned with Donald Trump. He hosted a Trump fundraiser in 2020, has been reported to have supported Trump-aligned political groups, and in 2026 was appointed by Trump to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. That does not make Oracle a political company. But it does mean Ellison’s personal politics now sit much closer to the centre of American technology policy than they once did.

The third strand is media. His son David Ellison now controls CBS and other Paramount assets through the Skydance-Paramount deal. The appointment of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, following Paramount’s acquisition of The Free Press, has intensified concern among critics that the family is reshaping a legacy broadcaster around a more explicitly ideological view of news. Those concerns have been sharpened by Oracle’s role in the US TikTok structure and Paramount’s proposed Warner Bros acquisition.

The fourth strand is concentration. A single family is now connected to a major database and cloud infrastructure company, a Hollywood studio, a legacy US broadcaster, a stake in one of the world’s most influential social platforms, and longstanding ties to Israeli political and military institutions. None of that is necessarily illegal. Much of it is simply business, investment and lawful philanthropy. But the scale is the point. Democracies have historically been uneasy when infrastructure, media, political access and foreign-policy interests begin to sit inside the same narrow circle of private power.

Why Europe should pay attention

It would be easy for a European reader to file Ellison as an American story. That would be a mistake. Oracle is one of the companies that sits inside the infrastructure layer of the AI age: databases, cloud services, enterprise software and government systems. Europe’s struggle to build sovereign technology it does not have to rent from American giants runs directly through companies like his. Any European bank, government department or hospital that relies on Oracle infrastructure is, in a small but real way, dependent on the empire Ellison built.

He is, in the end, a study in a particular kind of modern power: quiet, concentrated, patient and largely uninterested in the approval of others. He did not diversify when the textbooks said he should. He did not soften his politics or his giving to avoid controversy. He held, and he waited, and the AI boom made him, however briefly, the richest man alive.

Europe talks endlessly about the men who court attention. It might do better to watch the ones who do not.

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