Tech king Larry Ellison was declared the second richest person in the world this week with his staggering net worth of $251.2billion (£186bn). But he has promised to give most of his fortune away before his death.
The co-founder of Oracle, now 80, jumped ahead of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg in the Bloomberg wealth index, making Elon Musk the only man on the planet with more money than him. Investors targeting artificial intelligence stocks and a surging demand for generative AI resulted in Oracle’s shares rising by 5.7% earlier this week.
Most of Ellison’s wealth is in Oracle stock and below we look back at his rocky upbringing and how he ultimately became so rich that he bought his own island.
His full name is Lawrence Joseph Ellison and he was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1944 to a single mother called Florence Spellman.
He was struck by pneumonia at just nine months old and his mother eventually abandoned him before he was raised in Chicago to be with his aunt and uncle.
Ellison later hired a private investigator to find his birth mother and he told Vanity Fair: “We don’t talk about it face-to-face. It’s just too difficult. Most of the revelations have been through correspondence. She’s written me letters.
“There’s that sense of guilt. It’s a form of abandonment that mothers feel. Remember, [I learned] she’d actually raised me for nine months before giving me up. I got pneumonia and nearly died.”
Growing up, Ellison went down the education route after high school, and he got a place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
However, when his adoptive mother passed away in year two, he dropped out. He later joined the University of Chicago, but after just one semester, he again dropped out.
Despite not having a degree, he swapped Chicago for California aged 22, and worked for companies like Wells Fargo.
In 1977, Ellison and his partners founded a company called Software Development Laboratories. It was a way for computer systems to store and access information. Two years later it changed its name to Relationship Software Inc before it became Oracle Systems Corp in 1982.
Things then progressed fast. As the computer industry grew, so did Oracle, and they provided databases for companies to track information.
And by the time he was 49, Ellison, who dropped out of college twice, was a billionaire.
Being one of the richest men on the planet meant Ellison embraced some expensive hobbies, the most notable being yacht racing.
He has also splashed out lavishly over the years, including buying the Indian Wells tennis tournament in 2009 for $100million (£74m). He also has a collection of Richard Mille watches with some reportedly being worth over $1million.
Being 80, you may wonder who will inherit his billions after death, and in 2010 he gave a big indication of what would happen to his money.
This was after he signed the Giving Pledge meaning 95% of his fortune will be donated before he passes away. He has been known to be generous in the past, and gave $200m (£148m) to a cancer treatment center at the University of Southern California.
Ellison also owns 98% of Lanai island in Hawaii where rooms cost thousands of dollars a night. He bought the island for £238million in 2012 and he reportedly is now based there full time.
Unsurprisingly, the former Oracle CEO turned chairman has a huge real estate portfolio with homes in Rhode Island, Malibu and Palm Beach, Florida.
As for family life, he has a son, David, and a daughter, Megan, who both work in the film industry.
Megan is an Oscar-nominated film producer who founded Annapurna Pictures and David has also produced movies like the Mission: Impossible franchise and he is now the CEO of New Paramount after the merger of Skydance Media and Paramount last year.
Eillson meanwhile has been divorced four times but he has since reportedly remarried Keren Zhu who is 33.
As well as being buddies with Donald Trump, he also has Musk as an ally, and he offered to invest $1billion (£742m) after the Tesla CEO bought Twitter, now X, three years ago.