How an 81-Year-Old Oracle Founder Leapfrogged Elon Musk to Become the World's Richest—And Just Married a Woman 47 Years Younger

The Day Everything Changed

September 10, 2025, marks a watershed moment in billionaire rankings. Larry Ellison, the 81-year-old co-founder and largest shareholder of Oracle, officially dethroned Elon Musk as the world’s wealthiest individual. His net worth soared to $393 billion in a single trading session—a staggering $100 billion surge in one day—while Musk’s fortune dropped to $385 billion. The trigger? Oracle’s announcement of a landmark $300 billion, five-year partnership with OpenAI, sending the company’s stock into a frenzied rally of over 40%, its biggest daily gain since the company’s 1992 IPO.

This moment crystallizes something remarkable: at an age when most billionaires are contemplating legacy, Ellison is positioning himself at the epicenter of the AI revolution, the most transformative technological wave of our time.

From Dropout to Database Dominance

Ellison’s journey to this pinnacle reads like a Silicon Valley origin myth. Born in 1944 in the Bronx to an unmarried 19-year-old mother, he was given up for adoption and raised in Chicago by his aunt’s family. His adoptive father was a government employee; money was perpetually tight. Ellison attended the University of Illinois briefly, then the University of Chicago for just one semester, dropping out after his adoptive mother’s death.

Adrift through his twenties, Ellison drifted between programming jobs in Chicago before gravitating to Berkeley, California, where “people seemed freer and smarter.” His life’s inflection point arrived in the early 1970s at Ampex Corporation, where he worked on a CIA database project code-named “Oracle.”

In 1977, at 32, Ellison pooled $2,000 with colleagues Bob Miner and Ed Oates (he contributed $1,200) to launch Software Development Laboratories. They took the CIA’s relational database model, commercialized it, and named it Oracle. While Ellison wasn’t the theoretical inventor of database technology, he possessed something rarer: the vision to see its commercial potential and the ruthlessness to dominate the market.

By 1986, Oracle went public and became the enterprise software world’s rising star. For decades, it reigned unchallenged in database markets. Ellison cycled through nearly every executive role—president, chairman, CEO—before stepping down as CEO in 2014. Yet he remains Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, maintaining control of the company’s strategic direction.

The Late Innings Victory in AI Infrastructure

Oracle’s early cloud computing phase was humbling. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure outpaced it substantially. But Ellison played the long game. The company’s deep relationships with enterprise customers and its unmatched database technology proved durable assets. As generative AI exploded in 2024-2025, the demand for infrastructure—servers, data centers, processing power—became the new battlefield.

Oracle’s infrastructure bets suddenly looked prescient. The company announced a major restructuring in summer 2025: thousands of layoffs in hardware sales and legacy software divisions, coupled with aggressive investments in data centers and AI infrastructure. Practically overnight, Wall Street recast Oracle from “traditional software vendor” to “dark horse in AI infrastructure.”

The OpenAI partnership crystallized this narrative. With Oracle providing the computational backbone for OpenAI’s expansion, the two companies have effectively bet on each other. The market rewarded this symbiosis spectacularly—hence September 10’s historic surge and Ellison’s ascent to the top of the wealth rankings.

The Ellison Empire Expands Across Generations

Larry Ellison’s wealth has transcended individual achievement to become a family dynasty. His son, David Ellison, orchestrated the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global (CBS and MTV’s parent company), with $6 billion funded by family capital. With Larry dominant in Silicon Valley and David expanding into entertainment, the Ellisons have built a vertically integrated empire spanning technology and media.

Beyond business, Ellison has been a consistent political force. A Republican donor of note, he backed Marco Rubio’s 2015 presidential campaign and contributed $15 million to Senator Tim Scott’s Super PAC in 2022. In January 2025, he appeared at the White House alongside SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman to unveil a $500 billion AI data center initiative—a move blending commercial strategy with political influence.

The Contradictions of an 81-Year-Old Prodigal

Ellison embodies paradox: ruthless competitor yet disciplined ascetic; billionaire playboy yet relentless self-optimizer. He owns 98% of Hawaii’s Lanai island, multiple California estates, and rare yachts. Yet former executives note that in the 1990s and 2000s, he spent hours daily exercising, drank only water and green tea, and maintained strict dietary discipline—habits that leave him appearing decades younger than his chronological age.

His outdoor passions are legendary. A 1992 surfing accident nearly killed him; most would retire from the sport. Ellison doubled down, pivoting to sailing instead. He bankrolled Oracle Team USA’s improbable America’s Cup comeback in 2013—a victory hailed as one of sports’ greatest comebacks. In 2018, he founded SailGP, a high-speed catamaran racing league that has attracted investors including Anne Hathaway and Kylian Mbappé. He similarly revived tennis’s Indian Wells tournament, rebranding it as the “fifth Grand Slam.”

Sports, for Ellison, isn’t mere recreation. It’s his fountain of youth—a deliberate strategy for longevity and mental sharpness.

A Fifth Marriage at 81

In 2024, Ellison’s personal life again made headlines when a University of Michigan donation document casually revealed he had married Jolin Zhu, a Chinese-American woman 47 years his junior. Born in Shenyang, China, and a University of Michigan graduate, Zhu’s emergence as Mrs. Ellison briefly interrupted his carefully guarded privacy.

The marriage sparked the predictable social media commentary: jokes about Ellison’s dual passions—surfing and dating. Yet it also underscored a man determined to live expansively at an age when most retreat. This is his fifth marriage, a biographical pattern as restless and acquisitive as his business career.

Philanthropy on His Own Terms

In 2010, Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate at least 95% of his wealth. Unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, however, he rarely collaborates with peer philanthropists. As he told the New York Times, he “cherishes solitude and refuses to be influenced by outside ideas.”

His giving reflects this independence. In 2016, he donated $200 million to USC for cancer research. Recently, he announced directing portions of his wealth toward the Ellison Institute of Technology, a joint venture with Oxford University researching healthcare, agriculture, and climate solutions. His social media statement declared ambitions to “design a new generation of lifesaving drugs, build low-cost agricultural systems, and develop efficient and clean energy.”

Ellison’s philanthropy is deeply idiosyncratic—shaped by his vision rather than consensus-building with other billionaires.

The Unfinished Story

At 81, Larry Ellison has finally claimed the title of world’s richest person. His trajectory reads as a master class in technological foresight and relentless ambition: from penniless orphan to Silicon Valley pioneer to database empire builder to AI infrastructure kingpin. Along the way, he accumulated yachts, Hawaiian real estate, five marriages, and a son who conquered Hollywood.

The world’s richest man ranking may soon shift hands—billionaire fortunes are increasingly volatile in the age of AI. Yet Ellison has demonstrated something more durable: that the older generation of tech moguls remains far from irrelevant. In an era where artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of wealth creation, Ellison positioned himself not as a relic but as essential infrastructure. His wife may be 47 years younger, but his strategic vision remains sharp, his competitive fire undiminished, and his impact on the future unmistakably significant.