Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, is ranked No. 6 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $190 billion. He was briefly the world’s richest person in September 2025 after a surge in Oracle’s share price.
Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in New York City. As an infant he was adopted by his mother’s aunt and uncle and raised in Chicago’s South Shore neighbourhood. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, withdrew after his sophomore year, spent a term at the University of Chicago and then moved to California.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 6, with $190 billion
- Peak: on September 10, 2025, he was briefly the world’s wealthiest person, with an estimated $393 billion
Building Oracle
In the 1970s Ellison worked at Amdahl and then Ampex, where his first project was a database for the CIA code-named “Oracle”. He was inspired by Edgar F. Codd’s paper on relational databases. He co-founded Oracle Corporation and was its chief executive from 1977 to 2014; he is now chief technology officer and executive chairman.
Investments
- Lānaʻi: in June 2012 he agreed to buy 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi, at a price reported at between $500 million and $600 million
- Tesla: a stake worth over $19 billion, according to Wikipedia
- Media: his family trust funded the August 2025 merger of Paramount Global with Skydance Media, run by his son David Ellison; the trust remains the largest shareholder
- Others: stakes in Salesforce, NetSuite and Astex Pharmaceuticals
Giving Pledge
In August 2010 Ellison was listed among the 40 billionaires who had signed the Giving Pledge.
Why It Matters
Oracle’s cloud and database business is at the centre of the AI data-centre boom, which drove the sharp rise in Ellison’s fortune.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Larry Ellison speaking at an Oracle event in 2013. Photo: Oracle PR / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
