He’s nearly 82. Most guys his age are arguing about the thermostat or perfecting a golf swing in Florida. Not Larry Ellison. If you look at the Larry Ellison Oracle Corporation dynamic today, it’s arguably more intense than it was in the nineties. He’s the CTO. He’s the Chairman. He owns about 40% of the company. But those titles are just window dressing for the reality that Larry is still the spiritual and technical engine of the entire machine.
You've probably seen the headlines over the last decade. He stepped down as CEO in 2014. Safra Catz took the reins on the business side. Everyone thought he was heading to Lanai to live out his Bond-villain fantasies on his private Hawaiian island. They were wrong. Instead, Ellison pivoted. He stopped worrying about quarterly earnings calls and went back to what he actually likes: engineering.
The Pivot to the Cloud (That Almost Didn't Happen)
For a long time, Larry mocked the cloud. He famously called it "complete gibberish" in a 2008 rant that still lives on YouTube. He thought it was a fad. A marketing term. He was wrong, and for a few years, it looked like Oracle was going to be the next Kodak or Blockbuster. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was eating their lunch. Microsoft Azure was catching up.
Oracle was late. Very late.
But here is the thing about Larry Ellison. He doesn't just admit defeat; he obsesses over a comeback. He realized that if Oracle didn't own the infrastructure—the actual hardware and data centers—they were dead. So he poured billions into OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).
It wasn't just about catching up. It was about Gen 2 Cloud. Ellison’s pitch was simple: AWS is old. It’s "leaky." It’s insecure. He wanted to build a cloud where the network and the code were separated so hackers couldn't move laterally. It sounded like marketing fluff at first. Honestly, it kind of was. But then the performance benchmarks started coming in. People realized that for heavy database workloads, Oracle was actually faster and cheaper.
The AI Gold Rush and the Nvidia Connection
Fast forward to right now. 2026. The world is obsessed with AI. And who is sitting at the center of it? Larry.
He’s buddies with Jensen Huang at Nvidia. In fact, Oracle was one of the first big players to get their hands on the latest H100 and Blackwall chips. Why? Because Oracle’s RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) networking is specifically designed to handle the massive data throughput AI needs.
It’s a weird sight. You have this octogenarian billionaire talking about "GPU clusters" and "large language models" with the enthusiasm of a twenty-year-old at a hackathon. He’s not just delegating this. He’s in the weeds. He’s the one pushing the move to move all of Oracle’s internal applications—everything from HR to finance—onto autonomous databases that patch themselves while running.
Think about that. No human intervention. No DBAs (Database Administrators) manually typing commands to fix a security hole. That’s Larry’s vision. He wants to eliminate human error entirely.
Why the "Mean" Reputation Still Sticks
Larry isn't exactly a warm-and-fuzzy guy. He’s the guy who hired private investigators to dig through Microsoft’s trash back in the day. He’s sued Google. He’s sued SAP. He’s sued basically everyone.
People in Silicon Valley describe the Larry Ellison Oracle Corporation culture as "militant." It’s a sales-heavy organization. If you don't hit your numbers, you’re out. There is no "nap pod" culture here like there was at Google before the layoffs. It’s high-pressure. It’s aggressive.
But that aggression is what saved them. When Salesforce started stealing their CRM customers, Oracle didn't just sit there. They bought NetSuite. They bought Siebel. They bought Cerner for nearly $30 billion to get into healthcare. Larry doesn't build everything; he buys what he can't build faster.
The Healthcare Gamble
The Cerner acquisition is the biggest bet of his career. Bigger than the Sun Microsystems deal. Ellison wants to fix the US healthcare system. Bold? Yes. Delusional? Maybe.
The plan is a national, unified healthcare database. Currently, if you go to a hospital in New York and then one in LA, your records don't follow you. It’s a mess of faxes and PDFs. Ellison wants it all in the Oracle Cloud. He wants AI to look at your bloodwork and compare it to millions of other patients to catch cancer before your doctor even sees the results.
It’s a massive privacy nightmare for some. For Larry, it’s just a data problem. And he has spent fifty years solving data problems.
💡 You might also like: Dow jones indexes today: What the smart money is actually watching right now
The Lifestyle: Lanai and Boats
You can't talk about Larry without the toys. He owns 98% of Lanai. He owns a world-class sailing team. He flies fighter jets.
Is it a distraction? Some shareholders used to think so. But it’s actually part of the brand. Ellison represents a specific type of Silicon Valley founder that doesn't really exist anymore. He’s not trying to be relatable. He’s not wearing a gray t-shirt every day to save "cognitive energy." He’s a peacock. He likes the win. He likes the fight.
That competitive streak is baked into Oracle’s DNA. It’s why they are still relevant. Look at IBM. Look at HP. Those giants of the 80s and 90s have largely faded into the background or become "consulting" firms. Oracle is still a software powerhouse.
What Actually Matters for Your Business
If you're a business owner or an IT decision-maker, why do you care about Larry’s ego?
Because it dictates the roadmap.
- Automation is the only goal. If a task can be done by an autonomous system, Oracle will kill the manual version of that product. Don't invest in learning manual Oracle DB management; learn the autonomous architecture.
- Security is the "Red Line." After the various high-profile hacks of the last few years, Ellison has made "zero trust" the default. This makes Oracle products harder to customize sometimes, but much harder to break.
- Multi-cloud is finally real. For years, Larry tried to lock everyone into the Oracle ecosystem. He’s finally relented. The recent partnerships with Microsoft and Google (allowing Oracle databases to run inside Azure and GCP) are a massive shift. It means he’s prioritizing his database dominance over his cloud-infrastructure pride.
The Reality of the "Succession"
Who takes over after Larry? Safra Catz is a brilliant financial operator, but she isn't a product visionary.
The truth is, there is no "next Larry." When he eventually does step away—truly step away—Oracle will likely become a much more "boring" company. It will be stable. It will pay dividends. But that fire, that willingness to spend $28 billion on a healthcare company just because the current system "sucks," might vanish.
🔗 Read more: 1 usd to peso argentina: Why the Exchange Rate Gap Still Matters
For now, the Larry Ellison Oracle Corporation era continues. He’s still the most interesting man in tech, mostly because he’s the only one left who remembers what it was like to build the industry from nothing but a few lines of code and a lot of nerve.
Actionable Takeaways for Navigating the Oracle Ecosystem
If you are dealing with Oracle today, stop looking at them as a legacy database provider. They have morphed. Here is what you should actually do:
- Audit your "Shadow Cloud" costs. Many companies find that their AWS bills are bloated because they are running Oracle workloads on non-optimized hardware. Moving those specific workloads to OCI usually saves about 30-40%.
- Investigate Autonomous. If you are still paying a team to manually patch databases, you are wasting money. The autonomous tools are now stable enough for production.
- Leverage the Multi-Cloud Interconnect. If you are an Azure shop, don't try to migrate your DBs to SQL Server if they are built for Oracle. Use the OCI-Azure interconnect. It’s low latency and keeps your data where it actually runs best.
- Prepare for AI integration. Every Oracle SaaS product (Fusion, NetSuite) is getting generative AI features. Don't just ignore the updates. Some of the automated financial reporting tools are genuinely good enough to replace the first draft of your monthly reviews.
The era of Larry is far from over. It’s just getting more automated.