Larry Ellison

01Overview

02Published Estimates

The three figures land within about $12 billion of each other but are built differently. Bloomberg's $178B (October 16 close, as reported by Nairametrics) is made up of Oracle $122B, Tesla $16B and cash and other assets $40.2B. Its Oracle line is well below the roughly $148.5B that 1.158 billion shares were worth at that day's $128.23 close, and Bloomberg does not say why; one possibility is an allowance for the pledged shares or loans. Bloomberg also still credits Ellison with the Tesla stake he held as a director, which we leave out because no filing since 2022 shows whether he still owns it. Forbes' $169.1B is its real-time figure for October 19, 2026. Our $165.7B counts every Oracle share at market, Skydance at market using our estimate of the family's shares, and real estate at Forbes' valuation, and subtracts nothing for the undisclosed loans.

03Asset Breakdown

Ellison's wealth is mostly one stock. Oracle shares make up about 90% of our total, so every $10 move in ORCL changes his net worth by about $11.6 billion. The Skydance line is a market value based on our estimate of the family's shares, and real estate uses Forbes' February 2026 estimate.

Not included: Tesla shares. Ellison held about 45 million split-adjusted Tesla shares (15 million before Tesla's August 2022 3-for-1 split, about 1.5% of the company) when he left Tesla's board at its August 4, 2022 annual meeting. No filing since shows whether he still owns them, because as a former director he is no longer required to report. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index still counts about $16 billion of Tesla stock (October 16, 2026). If he still held all 45 million shares they would be worth about $16.6 billion at the October 19, 2026 Tesla close of $368.06, which would lift our estimate to about $182.3 billion. Also not included: cash and other investments (no sourced figure), his stake in X from the 2022 Twitter buyout (what it became after X's later mergers is not public), yachts, aircraft and art (no reliable valuations), and the Indian Wells tennis tournament. TikTok is not a personal holding: the 15% stake in the US joint venture belongs to Oracle.

04Current Positions

05Timeline

06Background

Early life

Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born in New York City on August 17, 1944, to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old single mother. After he had pneumonia at nine months old, he was sent to Chicago to live with her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted him.

He enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962 and left in 1964, shortly after his adoptive mother died. He spent a short time at the University of Chicago in 1966 and never finished a degree. He moved to California and worked as a programmer, including at Ampex from 1973 to 1976, where Bob Miner was his boss.

07Building Oracle

From contract shop to database company

In 1977 Ellison, Miner and Oates formed Software Development Laboratories to do contract programming. The name Oracle came from the code name of a CIA-funded project Ellison had worked on at Ampex, and the CIA bought the first copy of the product. In 1979 the company, by then called Relational Software, released Oracle, the first commercial relational database built around the SQL language. It was sold as Version 2, because Version 1 had been an internal prototype. The company took the product's name in the early 1980s.

Oracle went public on March 12, 1986 at $15 a share and closed its first day at $20.75, giving it a market value of about $270 million. By 1987 it was the largest database software company in the world.

The 1990 crisis

Fast growth caught up with Oracle in 1990. Shareholders sued over earnings forecasts, an internal review found earnings had been overstated, and the company restated three quarters, reported its first loss of nearly $36 million and laid off 10% of its domestic staff. Ellison rebuilt the management team, and by the end of 1992 the company was back on solid footing.

Acquisitions and the CEO handover

In June 2000 Forbes ranked Ellison second in the world at $47 billion, up from $9.5 billion a year earlier, behind only Bill Gates. The dot-com bust cut that to about $26 billion by 2001. In the 2000s Oracle grew by buying rivals: PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion after an 18-month hostile fight (closed January 2005), Siebel Systems for about $5.85 billion, BEA Systems for about $8.5 billion and Sun Microsystems for about $7.4 billion (closed January 2010). It later bought NetSuite for about $9.3 billion in 2016, a company Ellison owned 39.7% of, and Cerner for $28.3 billion in 2022, its largest deal.

Ellison stepped down as chief executive on September 18, 2014 and became executive chairman and chief technology officer. Oracle's proxy now calls the roles Executive Chair and CTO. He has never sold out of the company: at about 1.158 billion shares he owns roughly 38% of it, down from about 41% a year earlier. His share count barely changed; Oracle has more shares outstanding.

08The 2025 AI cloud surge and 2026 slide

The surge

Oracle became one of the main suppliers of computing power for artificial intelligence. In January 2025 Ellison appeared at the White House with OpenAI's Sam Altman and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son to announce the Stargate AI infrastructure venture. In June 2025 a record Oracle share price took him to $250.9 billion on Forbes' real-time list and second place in the world.

On September 9, 2025 Oracle reported $455 billion of remaining performance obligations, up 359% in a year, and forecast cloud infrastructure revenue rising from $18 billion in fiscal 2026 to $144 billion in fiscal 2030. The stock rose 36% the next day, its biggest gain since 1992, and closed at a record $328.33. Bloomberg said Ellison gained about $89 billion that day, the biggest one-day increase it had ever recorded. He passed Elon Musk for the top spot on Bloomberg's index during trading on September 10, but Musk was back in first place by the close, ahead by about $1 billion ($384.2 billion to $383.2 billion).

The slide

The gains did not last. Investors grew worried about how much Oracle was borrowing to build data centers: its notes payable reached about $125.3 billion by August 31, 2026, against $664 billion of contracted backlog. A sell-off in software stocks in early 2026 added to the pressure, and by February 6 Fortune reported Ellison was down about $59 billion for the year. Oracle traded as low as about $114.70 on July 28, 2026, its lowest level since May 2024, recovered to a close of $162.52 on September 8, and then slid back to about $130 by mid-October.

On June 22, 2026 Ellison set up a plan to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares, worth about $7.5 billion. After it was disclosed on September 11, he cancelled it the next day; Oracle said no shares had been sold and he had no other plans to sell. At the October 19, 2026 close of $129.59, Oracle was about 60% below its September 2025 record close. As of October 16, 2026, Bloomberg put his one-year loss at about $194 billion.

Pay and pledged shares

For fiscal 2026, Oracle raised Ellison's salary from $1 to $950,000, paid him a $4.9 million cash bonus and granted him stock options valued at $117.8 million with a $280 exercise price, far above the current share price. His real money is the stock itself.

Oracle's 2026 proxy shows 413 million of his shares pledged as collateral for personal term loans, up from 346 million a year earlier. Oracle says the loans fund outside business ventures, that none of the shares are in margin accounts, and that he can repay the loans without selling the pledged shares. The loan balances are not disclosed, which is why our headline is stated before loans.

09Paramount, Skydance and Warner Bros.

Buying Paramount

Ellison's son David founded Skydance in 2006 and in 2009 raised $350 million, partly from his father, to co-finance films with Paramount. In August 2025 the Ellison family and RedBird Capital completed an $8 billion deal to merge Skydance with Paramount, with the Ellisons putting in about $6 billion. Forbes reported, citing FCC filings, that after the merger David held half of the voting power, Larry 27.5% and RedBird 22.5%, and, citing regulatory filings, that Larry owned the equity.

Warner Bros. Discovery

In December 2025, during Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, Ellison gave an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion of the equity financing. The companies signed a deal in February 2026 at $31 a share, about $110 billion including debt, and the takeover closed on October 6, 2026. The combined company is now Skydance Corporation, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange as SKYD.

To fund the deal, the Ellison family invested about $17 billion, buying roughly 1.4 billion shares at $12 each, alongside Middle East sovereign funds, RedBird and others. Paramount lined up $54 billion of debt commitments for the deal and took on Warner Bros. Discovery's borrowings. The Ellisons and RedBird hold all of the voting stock.

How we value it

No filing or reputable report gives Larry Ellison's personal share count in Skydance Corporation, so we value an estimate of the Ellison family's shares at market. Bloomberg, from public filings, estimates the family bought about 1.4 billion shares at $12 in the 2026 financing. Before the deal, Paramount Skydance's February 2026 filing showed about 477 million shares held by entities David Ellison may be deemed to control, not counting warrants. Together that is about 1.88 billion shares, worth about $12.76 billion at the October 19, 2026 close of $6.80. Some of those entities may include outside investors, and how the shares are split between Larry and David is not disclosed, so this is an estimate of family holdings that we count in full for Larry.

The market value is far below the cost. The family committed about $23 billion: roughly $6 billion in 2025 and about $17 billion in 2026. Skydance shares closed at $9.53 on October 6, 2026, their first day under the SKYD ticker, and at $6.80 on October 19, well under the $12 the family paid. Counted at cost instead, Skydance would add about $23 billion and our estimate would be about $176 billion, the top of our range. The bottom of the range, about $162 billion, counts only the 1.4 billion shares bought in 2026.

10TikTok

The TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which took over TikTok's US business, was formed in January 2026. Oracle owns 15%, alongside Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX, and hosts US user data and reviews the app's code and recommendation system. Oracle's quarterly filing for the period ended February 28, 2026 showed about $2.2 billion of non-marketable investments, a substantial majority of it the TikTok stake. Ellison has no personal stake that we could find; his exposure comes through his Oracle shares, so we do not count TikTok separately.

11Real estate and Lanai

Forbes estimated Ellison's real estate at about $2.9 billion in February 2026. The largest piece is Lanai: in June 2012 he bought about 98% of the 141-square-mile Hawaiian island, including two resorts and two golf courses. The price was never officially disclosed; Forbes reports about $300 million. Forbes put Lanai's assessed value at $1.2 billion in February 2026.

He moved his legal residence from Lanai to Florida in 2023, to an oceanfront estate in Manalapan he bought in 2022 for $173 million, a Florida record. Forbes estimated the move saved him about $1 billion in Hawaii state tax. He has kept buying in Palm Beach County, including the Eau Palm Beach resort and the Lion Country Safari park, and his holdings stretch from Malibu and Woodside, California to Newport, Rhode Island and Lake Tahoe.

12Philanthropy and the Ellison Institute

Ellison signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, promising to give away at least 95% of his wealth. His Ellison Medical Foundation gave about $1 billion, mainly for research on aging, before it closed. In 2016 he gave $200 million to the University of Southern California to start a cancer research institute. Public filings show he gave about $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change from 2021 to late 2025, according to the Financial Times.

His largest project is the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, England. It committed about GBP 1 billion to a new campus and in October 2025 announced a GBP 890 million expansion for up to 7,000 staff, with the campus due in 2027. Ellison has talked of spending about GBP 10 billion over a decade, but the Financial Times reported in November 2025 that only about GBP 2 billion had been committed and that the plans had been scaled back after Sir John Bell left as president in September 2025.

13Legal matters

In January 2001 Ellison sold nearly $900 million of Oracle stock, weeks before the company warned on earnings. Shareholders filed a derivative suit. A Delaware court cleared him of insider trading, and in 2005 he settled the California case by agreeing to donate $100 million to charity in Oracle's name and pay $22 million in legal fees.

Shareholders also sued over Oracle's 2016 purchase of NetSuite, which Ellison partly owned. The Delaware Chancery Court ruled for Ellison in May 2023, and the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed in January 2025, finding he did not control Oracle's decision on the deal.

14Ellison's Wealth Over Time

Dated figures from Forbes and Bloomberg. The two trackers use different methods, so compare within a tracker where possible.

Bloomberg had Ellison at about $372 billion a year before its October 16, 2026 figure, a drop of about $194 billion. The Forbes 400 figure was $72 billion lower than in 2025, the biggest dollar decline on the list.

15Notable Properties

Reported purchases. Prices are what was paid, not current values; together with his other holdings Forbes valued his real estate at about $2.9 billion in February 2026.

Forbes counts roughly a dozen properties on Malibu's Carbon Beach (February 2026), and Business Insider reports homes at Lake Tahoe. The Lion Country Safari buyer shares an address with the Larry Ellison Foundation, so it may not be a personal holding.

16Frequently Asked Questions

17Sources and Method