Larry Ellison

THE DATABASE KING WHO BOUGHT THE AI REVOLUTION

Oracle's co-founder went from 1970s database salesman to the man bankrolling America's AI buildout — Stargate's $500 billion data centers, OpenAI's landlord, and briefly the richest person alive.

1. Aug 17, 1944

   CHICAGO KID: BORN AUGUST 17, 1944

   Born August 17, 1944, in New York City to unwed mother Florence Spellman; sent to Chicago at nine months and adopted by his aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison. The Chicago-raised double college dropout later taught himself to code.

   SOURCES: Britannicareported

2. 1977

   $2,000 AND A DATABASE: ELLISON CO-FOUNDS ORACLE

   In 1977 Ellison co-founded Software Development Laboratories with Bob Miner and Ed Oats; it was later renamed Oracle after its best-selling database product. He ran it as CEO from 1977 to 2014.

   SOURCES: CaproAsiareported

3. May 14, 2024

   MUSK WANTS $10 BILLION OF ELLISON'S SERVERS

   The Information reported Elon Musk's xAI was nearing a $10 billion, multi-year deal to rent Oracle cloud servers, which would have made xAI one of Oracle's largest customers. xAI was already Oracle's largest H100 customer with 15,000+ Nvidia chips.

   SOURCES: SRN News (Reuters)reported

4. Jul 2024

   MUSK DUMPS ELLISON, BUILDS HIS OWN GPU MONSTER

   Elon Musk ended xAI's expanded Oracle cloud talks and announced xAI would build its own 100,000-H100 cluster instead. Musk confirmed Grok 2 trained on 24,000 H100s from Oracle; Oracle stock dropped up to 4.8% on the news.

   SOURCES: Livemintreported

5. Jan 2025

   STARGATE: ELLISON STEPS UP TO THE WHITE HOUSE FOR $500 BILLION

   In January 2025, Ellison stood alongside Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son at the White House to unveil Project Stargate, a $500 billion AI data center buildout over four years with Oracle as the infrastructure backbone.

   SOURCES: FinancialContent (MarketMinute)reported

6. Jul 2025

   $300 BILLION MORE: ORACLE BECOMES OPENAI'S LANDLORD

   OpenAI and Oracle formalized a $300 billion, five-year agreement to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate data center capacity, cementing Oracle as critical infrastructure for OpenAI's frontier-model training.

   SOURCES: FinancialContent (MarketMinute)reported

7. Sep 10, 2025

   RICHEST MAN ALIVE: ELLISON TOPS MUSK FOR ONE DAY

   Oracle's AI-driven stock surge (RPO backlog hit $455 billion) pushed Ellison's net worth to about $393-400 billion on September 10, briefly making him the world's richest person ahead of Elon Musk. The lead lasted roughly one day.

   SOURCES: Akron Beacon Journalreported

8. Sep 25, 2025

   ELLISON GRABS TIKTOK'S KEYS IN $14 BILLION TRUMP DEAL

   Trump's September 25 executive order set up a U.S. investor group led by Ellison to take an 80.1% stake in TikTok's U.S. operations, with Oracle taking ~15% and auditing the algorithm as security provider. VP Vance valued the deal at $14 billion.

   SOURCES: Inc.reported

KNOWN ASSOCIATES

• OpenAIPALACE INTRIGUE. FUTURE BEFORE LUNCH.
• OracleDATABASE BARON MEETS STARGATE