Asked to name the smartest person he’s ever met, Elon Musk had a quick response: “Larry Ellison is very smart. I would say he is one of the smartest.”
Now, Ellison is also the richest person Musk has ever met, after he briefly surpassed him this week to top the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
On Wednesday, the Oracle software honcho’s net worth jumped by $101 billion — the biggest one-day increase ever recorded on the index — to $382 billion, pushing him past the Tesla boss.
By the end of the day’s trading, Musk had clawed things back in his favor — but only by a mere billion.
Still, sources say becoming the world’s richest man checked a major box for Ellison.
“He’s been waiting for this moment for almost 50 years,” said an insider, referring to the lack of acclaim outside of Silicon Valley for Oracle, which sells software to businesses and therefore has not been as recognizable to everyday people as companies like Google or Microsoft.
There are others who believe the hard-charging Ellison, now 81, took it in stride.
“I bet he would be making some friendly jokes about being the world’s wealthiest,” Julian Guthrie, who spent a year interviewing Ellison for her book “The Billionaire and the Mechanic” told The Post.
“Larry is very different from the caricature of Larry. He is introspective, self-deprecating, incessantly inquisitive, a voracious reader of all sorts of things.”
Some of those myriad interests include, “music, sports, material science,” and perhaps surprisingly, “Japanese pottery.”
In fact, Ellison maintains an avid interest in all things related to Japan. He has an extensive collection of Japanese art, covering at least 1,100 years — 64 of his pieces were displayed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco — as well as Samurai swords.
The Japanese aesthetic extends to his 23-acre estate in Woodside, California. That spread is designed to resemble a Kyoto getaway, complete with private lake, tea house and koi pond, which he is reported to have spent $200m renovating.
As if that wasn’t enough he even owns an actual villa in Kyoto, Japan, situated on the grounds of a Zen Buddhist temple, which is said to be worth up to $86 million and reflects his “deep appreciation for Japanese culture and design.”
Regarding Ellison – currently married to his fifth wife Jolin Zhu, 34 – Guthrie added, “He’s comfortable with who he is. But it’s more about this awareness of what’s most important: It’s your family, it’s your immediate group, it’s your kids.”
Ellison’s offspring, with his third wife Barbara Boothe, are David and Megan Ellison. The brother and sister are currently making waves in Hollywood: David is CEO and chairman of Paramount, a Skydance Corporation, while Megan has produced highly regarded movies such as “American Hustle” and “Phantom Thread.”
Ellison’s mega boost in his net worth came with the announcement Tuesday that Sam Altman’s OpenAI had cut a $300 billion deal for Oracle to build data centers that will be used to develop his company’s artificial intelligence.
“Data centers are the biggest revenue generators. Oracle has aggressively entered that world and they just got their first big tenant,” explained Gary Rivlin, author of “The Plot to Get Bill Gates” and “AI Valley,” to The Post.
Ellison watchers are interested to see what he may invest in with his new windfall, since he already has a reputation for living large.
He has more than a dozen homes; according to Robb Report, including a San Francisco mansion, the homes in Woodside and Japan, a Newport, Rhode Island, estate that once belonged to the Astors and the most expensive home in New Jersey – a $173 million compound in the town of Manalapan.
Perhaps Ellison’s most extravagant purchase is Lanai, the sixth largest Hawaiian island, of which he owns 98%. A former pineapple plantation, the island features two luxury Four Seasons resorts, and Ellison has developed lavish gardens displaying some of his collected artwork and a golf course.
The island is only habited in one place, Lanai City, which has just 3,000 residents and boasts just one school, one hospital and no traffic lights. Ellison is the main employer for almost everyone on the island.
He has a number of different ways he can travel there, owning two military jets – which he is a pilot, qualified to fly – and a super-luxury yacht.
Named Musashi, in tribute to the great samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi, the yacht is 288 feet long, designed in a minimalist Japanese style and cost some $160 million. It takes 23 crew to operate, has five decks and includes a gym, spa, cinema and a glass elevator at its center.
“He has a lot of toys, at the highest level,” said Guthrie. “He gets a lot of pleasure out of beautifully designed [things].”
The mega-yacht also has a basketball court, and because shooting baskets is less of a science than designing software, sometimes shots go awry and balls go overboard.
But Ellison has a solution for that: Sports Illustrated reported that a powerboat trails the superyacht and has a person tasked with picking errant balls out of the ocean.
It’s a move which would not have seemed out of place from Gavin Belson, the overwrought, power-hungry and often absurd CEO character in the HBO tech parody series “Silicon Valley.” Sources said they believe the character is partly based on Ellison, who did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Ellison started out far from a world where private jets and yachts would part of everyday life. Born in the Bronx and raised on Chicago’s South Side, he dropped out of both University of Illinois and University of Chicago.
Along the way, however, he excelled at physics and that led him to computer programming jobs when he was in his 20s.
In the book “Softwar,” author Matthew Sybond describes Ellison landing in Berkeley in the 1960s and flitting through a variety of well-paying tech gigs before co-launching his own firm, with clients that included the CIA. Ellison cofounded Oracle Systems Corporation in the early 1977, naming it for a database that he had helped to develop.
Oracle grew to be one of Silicon Valley’s top database companies, creating software and cloud services. The company offered reliable products and aggressively expanded, turning Ellison into a billionaire many times over. In March 2010, Forbes magazine named him the sixth richest man in America, with a net worth of more than $28 billion.
As to how he got there, Rivlin said, “We probably throw around the world brilliant too much. But I think he is a brilliant guy who figured out that databases would be really important. He hired the right people, made very aggressive hires, offered them huge bonuses if they could exceed expectations.”
In life, Ellison exceeded expectations on his own. He is a licensed airplane pilot who portrayed himself in “Iron Man 2” and made a White House visit to Donald Trump (along with Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son) during the President’s first full day in office.
“He’s sort of CEO of everything,” Trump said of Ellison, a longtime supporter. “He’s an amazing man.”
As to what happens next for Ellison, will he just rest on his considerable laurels and live a quiet life?“He’s not done yet,” predicts Rivlin. “He’s always kept himself in really great shape. He’s given millions of dollars to research aging.That’s a big Silicon Valley thing. And, of course, Larry Ellison has been part of it because he’s part of everything in Silicon Valley.”
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