Larry Ellison
Source of wealth: Oracle
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Modules
Biography
Larry Ellison is chairman, chief technology officer and cofounder of software giant Oracle, of which he owns roughly 40%.
Ellison gave up the Oracle CEO role in 2014 after 37 years at the helm.
In September 2025, he became the second person ever worth more than $400 billion, thanks to an AI-driven boom in Oracle's stock price.
In 2012, he bought nearly all of the Hawaii island of Lanai for $300 million.
Ellison sat on Tesla's board from 2018 to 2022. He owned 45 million split-adjusted shares before stepping down as a director.
Ellison also owns nearly 50% of media giant Paramount Skydance, which formed after the nearly $28 billion (enterprise value) merger of Paramount and his son David's Skydance in August 2025.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Larry Ellison
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Larry Ellison, linked to Technology and 'Oracle', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 1653 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 107.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.