From Dropout to Billionaire: How 81-Year-Old Larry Ellison Became the World's Richest Person in One Day

On September 10, 2025, something extraordinary happened in the tech world. An 81-year-old man quietly claimed the title of world’s richest person, dethroning Elon Musk with a net worth that reached $393 billion. His name is Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, and his journey from a struggling orphan to commanding unprecedented wealth represents one of the most dramatic reinventions in Silicon Valley history.

The catalyst for this meteoric rise wasn’t a new innovation, but rather Oracle’s announcement of a $300 billion, five-year partnership with OpenAI. The market’s response was explosive—Oracle’s stock surged more than 40% in a single day, marking its largest gain since 1992. For Ellison, this moment crystallized four decades of strategic positioning in the database market finally paying dividends in the AI infrastructure boom.

The Unlikely Origin Story

To understand how an 81-year-old could still capture the world’s attention and fortune, you must first understand where he started. Born in 1944 in the Bronx to an unmarried teenager, Ellison was abandoned at nine months old. His adoptive father was a modest government worker, and financial hardship defined his childhood. College proved no easier—he dropped out of the University of Illinois after his adoptive mother died, and later abandoned the University of Chicago after just one semester.

Yet poverty and personal tragedy didn’t break him; they seemed to free him. Young Ellison drifted across America, picking up programming work in Chicago before migrating to Berkeley, California. He was drawn to places where “people seemed freer and smarter.” This restless spirit would become his signature trait.

The CIA Project That Changed Everything

The turning point came in the early 1970s when Ellison joined Ampex Corporation, a company specializing in data processing and storage. There, he participated in a classified project for the CIA—designing a database system to manage and query intelligence data efficiently. The project’s codename was “Oracle,” a name that would eventually carry far more weight than anyone imagined at the time.

In 1977, at age 32, Ellison partnered with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, pooling just $2,000 to establish Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Their gamble was audacious: create a commercial database system based on their CIA work. They named it Oracle.

What separated Ellison from others wasn’t inventing database technology—it was recognizing its commercial potential when others saw only academic exercises. In 1986, Oracle went public on NASDAQ, and Ellison’s vision proved prophetic. Over four decades, despite competition from AWS and Azure in cloud computing, Oracle maintained its iron grip on enterprise data management, cementing Ellison as not just a businessman, but the architect of modern enterprise infrastructure.

The Man Who Refuses to Age Gracefully

Now at 81 years old, Ellison defies conventional wisdom about aging executives. He isn’t sitting in boardrooms—he’s surfing, sailing, and restructuring billion-dollar AI infrastructure plays. A near-death surfing accident in 1992 barely slowed him down. Instead, he channeled his appetite for extreme experiences into competitive sailing, founding SailGP and orchestrating one of sports’ greatest comebacks when Oracle Team USA won the America’s Cup in 2013.

His discipline borders on obsession. Former executives recall him exercising for hours daily in the 1990s and 2000s, consuming only water and green tea, maintaining a diet that would make fitness influencers jealous. The result: a man who appears 20 years younger than his chronological age, defying the usual trajectory of octogenarians.

In 2024, Ellison quietly married Jolin Zhu, a Chinese-American woman 47 years his junior, underscoring a pattern: his personal life remains as adventurous and controversial as his business career. With five marriages to his name, he seems to approach romance with the same risk-taking mentality he brings to technology and sports.

A Family Empire Spanning Two Worlds

Ellison’s wealth isn’t contained within himself—it’s expanding across generations and industries. His son, David Ellison, orchestrated the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global (parent company of CBS and MTV), with $6 billion coming from Ellison family coffers. This move represented the family’s strategic expansion into Hollywood, creating a tech-to-media dynasty that rivals the old-money conglomerates.

Beyond business, Ellison wields political influence. He’s a longtime Republican donor, having financed Marco Rubio’s 2015 presidential campaign and contributed $15 million to Tim Scott’s Super PAC. In January 2025, he appeared at the White House alongside Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion AI data center initiative—a deal that positions Oracle technology at the infrastructure heart of the AI revolution.

Contradictions of a Visionary

Ellison embodies paradoxes. He owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, multiple California mansions, and some of the world’s finest yachts—yet maintains monastic discipline in his daily routines. He’s competitive to the point of obsession, holding nearly every executive position at Oracle at various points, yet isolated enough to pursue personal projects like tennis tournaments and sailing leagues.

In 2010, he signed the Giving Pledge, committing 95% of his wealth to philanthropy. But unlike Gates or Buffett, he shuns collaborative efforts, instead directing investments through his own vision: the Ellison Institute of Technology (with Oxford University) researching healthcare, agriculture, and clean energy. His note was characteristically blunt: we’ll design lifesaving drugs, build low-cost agricultural systems, and develop clean energy—solo, on his terms.

The Unfinished Story

At 81, Larry Ellison finally claimed the title of world’s richest person. But this moment isn’t about reaching an endpoint—it’s another chapter in a life defined by rebellion, reinvention, and refusal to conform. He transformed a CIA database project into a global empire, navigated the cloud computing wars, and positioned himself at the epicenter of AI infrastructure when many his age were considering retirement.

Wealth, influence, marriage, sports, and philanthropy swirl around him in constant motion. He remains the prodigal son of Silicon Valley: stubborn, competitive, and utterly uncompromised by age or convention. The title of world’s richest may be temporary, but Ellison has already proven something more durable: that in an era of transformation, age is merely a number, and legacy belongs to those bold enough to keep reshaping it.