Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison is named in 19 events across the Capture Cascade Timeline, from 1977 to 2026.
Quick facts
Full name: Lawrence Joseph Ellison Born: August 17, 1944, the Bronx, New York Net worth: roughly $264 billion, rising to about $393 billion at peak (per Fortune, September 2025); swings track Oracle’s stock-price response to the AI-infrastructure narrative. Ellison briefly held the title of world’s wealthiest individual in late 2025. Oracle stake: approximately 1.15 billion shares / about 41% of Oracle, making him the dominant single shareholder and de facto controller (per Oracle 8-K, July 2025; some 2025 reporting cites about 35%). Education: attended the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago; left both without graduating.
Key positions
| Role | Organization | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Co-founder, Executive Chairman, CTO | Oracle Corporation | Founded June 1977 as Software Development Laboratories |
| Co-founder | Stargate LLC | Announced at the White House, January 21, 2025; Oracle’s named share of a $100B initial AI-infrastructure pledge |
| Member | President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) | Appointed March 25, 2026 |
| Principal financier | Paramount Skydance | Backed son David Ellison’s roughly $8B Paramount Global acquisition; vehicle holds UFC media rights via a $7.7B deal announced 2025 |
| Co-investor (about 15%) | TikTok U.S. joint venture | Oracle-led consortium with Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX; signed December 18, 2025 |
Biography
Larry Ellison was born in the Bronx in 1944 and raised in Chicago by his maternal aunt and uncle after being given up for adoption at nine months. He attended the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago but left both without a degree, moved to the Berkeley area in 1966, and worked a series of programming jobs at Amdahl, Wells Fargo, and Ampex. At Ampex he worked on a CIA database contract codenamed “Project Oracle.” When that contract lapsed, Ellison and his Ampex colleagues Robert Miner and Ed Oates founded Software Development Laboratories in June 1977 to pick up the work for $50,000. The firm became Relational Software, Inc. in 1979 and Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982 — taking the CIA project’s codename as the company name. Oracle’s first commercial product was sold to the CIA in 1979 for use at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (Gizmodo, October 3, 2014; SF Chronicle, August 17, 2003).
The government relationship that began at Oracle’s founding never broke. The CIA was the founding customer; the NSA and the armed services followed, and by 2003 the federal government accounted for roughly 23% of Oracle’s licensing revenue (SF Chronicle, August 17, 2003). Through hostile and friendly acquisitions — PeopleSoft (2005, about $10.3B, hostile), Sun Microsystems (2010, about $7.4B), and Cerner (2022, about $28.3B, which brought Oracle the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense electronic health-record systems) — Ellison turned a database vendor into a full federal-infrastructure conglomerate. Oracle is now one of four firms holding the Pentagon’s $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability ceiling (awarded December 2022), and in February 2026 booked an $88 million Air Force Cloud One contract supporting Top Secret/SCI workloads.
In the second Trump administration Ellison moved to the center of federal AI and media policy. On January 21, 2025 — one day after the inauguration — he appeared at the White House alongside Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son to co-found Stargate LLC, a Delaware joint venture pledging $100 billion initially and up to $500 billion by 2029 (OpenAI, January 21, 2025). In December 2025 an Oracle-led consortium including Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX signed a deal taking over TikTok’s U.S. operations, with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each holding about 15% (NPR, December 18, 2025). On March 25, 2026 Trump named Ellison — and Oracle’s Safra Catz — to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (White House, March 25, 2026). Ellison’s son David Ellison’s roughly $8 billion Paramount Global acquisition, which Larry principally financed, closed in 2025; the combined company then acquired UFC media rights in a $7.7 billion deal.
Ellison is a major Republican donor and a documented backer of Israeli military causes. He gave more than $31 million to GOP candidates in the 2022 midterms and $1 million to a pro-Lindsey Graham PAC (Bloomberg, July 31, 2025). He is described in reporting as the single largest U.S. private donor to the Israel Defense Forces through Friends of the IDF, including a $16.6 million gift in 2017 (Truthout, 2024). At a 2024 Oracle financial-analyst meeting he publicly described an AI-driven surveillance future in which “citizens will be on their best behavior” (Fortune, September 17, 2024) — a statement reporting later revisited in light of his TikTok and federal-cloud roles.
Sources
- Larry Ellison — Wikipedia (biographical synthesis), 2026-05. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
- “Larry Ellison’s Oracle Started As a CIA Project,” Gizmodo, 2014-10-03. https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238
- “Oracle’s coziness with government goes back to its founding,” San Francisco Chronicle, 2003-08-17. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/oracle-s-coziness-with-government-goes-back-to-2820370.php
- Oracle 8-K — July 2025 (Ellison ownership about 41% / 1.15B shares), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2025-07. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001341439/000095017025084831/orcl-ex99_1.htm
- “President Trump Announces Appointments to PCAST,” White House, 2026-03-25. https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/03/president-trump-announces-appointments-to-presidents-council-of-advisors-on-science-and-technology/
- “Oracle Billionaire Larry Ellison Gave $1 Million To Pro-Lindsey Graham PAC,” Bloomberg, 2025-07-31. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-31/oracle-billionaire-larry-ellison-gave-1-million-to-pro-lindsey-graham-pac