From Database Pioneer to AI Infrastructure Play: How 81-Year-Old Larry Ellison Reclaimed the Billionaire Crown—And Found Love Again

The world’s richest person just changed hands once more. On September 10th, 81-year-old Larry Ellison officially dethroned Elon Musk to claim the top spot, with his net worth spiking to $393 billion—a staggering $100+ billion jump in a single trading session. Oracle’s stock had just exploded over 40% following news of massive new AI infrastructure contracts, marking the software giant’s most dramatic single-day surge since 1992. What makes this moment particularly intriguing isn’t just the wealth milestone, but the fact that Ellison achieved it by pivoting to an entirely new technology frontier—and did so while simultaneously making headlines for his personal life, including his quiet 2024 marriage to Jolin Zhu, a spouse 47 years his junior.

The Accidental Architect of the Information Age

Few recognize that Larry Ellison wasn’t supposed to be anyone. Born in 1944 in the Bronx to an unmarried 19-year-old, he was surrendered for adoption at nine months old. His adoptive parents provided modest means; his adoptive father worked as a government employee, and the family scraped by. Ellison briefly attempted college twice—first at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then the University of Chicago—but neither stuck. Death would cut short his academic pursuits: his adoptive mother’s passing during his sophomore year sent him spiraling away from formal education.

What followed was years of restlessness. Ellison drifted across America working programming gigs in Chicago before gravitating toward Berkeley, California, where the counterculture vibe and emerging tech scene felt like his tribe. “People there seemed freer and smarter,” he once reflected. It was this search for intellectual freedom that eventually led him to Ampex Corporation in the early 1970s, a data processing specialist. There, while working on a classified CIA project codenamed “Oracle”—designing database architecture for the intelligence agency—Ellison glimpsed something no one else did: the commercial potential of databases.

In 1977, a 32-year-old Ellison co-founded Software Development Laboratories with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, investing just $2,000 of personal capital. They commercialized the relational database model they’d developed for government work and gave it the same name as their secret project: Oracle. The bet paid off spectacularly. By 1986, Oracle was trading on NASDAQ. By the 2000s, it commanded the enterprise database market.

Ellison’s genius wasn’t inventing the database—it was seeing what others couldn’t: that databases would become the nervous system of enterprise computing. While competitors focused on engineering purity, Ellison focused on market dominance.

When Legacy Meets Momentum: The Unexpected AI Renaissance

Here’s the plot twist no one predicted in 2023: the 80-year-old database mogul who seemed destined to fade into tech history just became the poster child for AI infrastructure.

Oracle had limped through the early cloud computing wars, losing market share to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. By the early 2020s, Ellison’s company looked like a relic—still profitable, still powerful within enterprise walls, but increasingly irrelevant to what seemed like the future. Then came the generative AI explosion.

When OpenAI and other AI labs needed massive computational capacity, they discovered that Oracle’s historical advantages—decades of relationships with enterprise decision-makers, unmatched database expertise, a loyal customer base—suddenly became essential. In Q3 2025, Oracle announced multi-hundred-billion-dollar contracts, including a landmark five-year, $300 billion partnership with OpenAI for AI infrastructure services.

The market’s reaction was violent. Investors understood what was happening: Oracle wasn’t being disrupted by AI; it was becoming AI’s backbone. The company, under Ellison’s strategic direction, had simultaneously slashed its traditional software and hardware divisions while pouring billions into data centers and AI-optimized infrastructure. The late pivot had worked.

Building Empires Across Generations

Ellison’s influence extends far beyond his own balance sheet. His son, David Ellison, orchestrated the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global (parent to CBS and MTV), with the Ellison family contributing $6 billion. Two generations, two industries, one exponentially expanding empire: the father commands Silicon Valley’s infrastructure layer while the son controls major entertainment distribution channels. It’s a power architecture that spans technology and content—arguably more influential than either domain alone.

Politically, Ellison has never been shy about leveraging his wealth. Republican-aligned, he financed Marco Rubio’s 2015 presidential bid and donated $15 million to Tim Scott’s Super PAC in 2022. In January 2025, he appeared at a White House announcement flanking OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son to unveil a $500 billion AI data center initiative, signaling that Ellison’s company would anchor this new infrastructure layer. The move was simultaneously commercial, technological, and political.

The Contradictions of a Life Lived Loud

At 81, Ellison embodies contradictions that shouldn’t coexist: ruthless competitor and solitary thinker; billionaire industrialist and extreme athlete; serial spouse collector and disciplined health devotee.

He owns 98% of Hawaii’s Lanai island and maintains several sprawling California estates. His yacht collection rivals small national navies. Yet his personal regimen would exhaust someone 40 years younger. Former executives from his companies report that during the 1990s and 2000s, Ellison spent several hours daily exercising. He consumes almost nothing but water and green tea, maintains a meticulously controlled diet, and credits this discipline for appearing “20 years younger than his peers.”

His athletic pursuits are equally extreme: he nearly died surfing in 1992 yet continued the sport for years. He pivoted to competitive sailing and bankrolled Oracle Team USA’s 2013 America’s Cup comeback—one of sport’s most legendary comebacks. In 2018, he created SailGP, a high-speed catamaran league that now counts actress Anne Hathaway and footballer Mbappé among its backers.

His personal relationships have been tabloid fodder for decades. Five marriages across his lifetime, most recently a quiet 2024 union with his spouse, Jolin Zhu, a Chinese-American woman born in Shenyang who graduated from the University of Michigan. She is 47 years younger than Ellison. The marriage was only publicly confirmed through a university document listing “Larry Ellison and his wife, Jolin” as donors. Social media erupted with jokes about Ellison’s twin passions: surfing and romance. For him, both the waves and the dating scene seem to hold eternal allure.

Charity on His Own Terms

In 2010, Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate at least 95% of his wealth—placing him among the world’s most generous pledgers. Yet his philanthropic style sharply contrasts with peers like Gates and Buffett. He rarely convenes with other mega-philanthropists, guards his autonomy fiercely, and according to a New York Times profile, “cherishes his solitude and refuses to be influenced by outside ideas.”

His giving reflects this independence. He donated $200 million to USC in 2016 for a cancer research center. Recently, he announced backing for the Ellison Institute of Technology, a partnership with Oxford University, to pursue research in healthcare innovation, sustainable agriculture, and clean energy. “We will design a new generation of lifesaving drugs, build low-cost agricultural systems, and develop efficient and clean energy,” he wrote on social media—framing philanthropy not as charity but as legacy-building through technology.

The Unexpected Denouement

At 81, Larry Ellison has achieved something rarer than wealth: he became relevant again. The man who built his fortune on understanding databases—infrastructure nobody sees but everyone depends on—had the foresight to recognize that AI would need exactly what Oracle had to offer: reliable, scalable data architecture.

His marriage to his much-younger spouse, his continued athletic adventures, his political presence, his burgeoning family empire across tech and entertainment—these aren’t distractions from his business genius. They’re all part of the same restless energy that once propelled a college dropout to build a global database empire. Forty years later, the core drive remains unchanged: dominate the infrastructure upon which others depend.

The title of world’s richest person will likely rotate again. But for now, Ellison has demonstrated something more valuable than fleeting wealth rankings: that the titans of yesterday’s technology can architect tomorrow’s infrastructure—if they refuse to accept obsolescence.