It would have been interesting last week to have been privy to the private chat between Larry Ellison and his fellow technology tycoon, the man Ellison describes as “my dear friend”, Elon Musk.
Last Wednesday, Ellison, the 81-year-old founder of the technology giant Oracle, overtook Musk as the richest man in the world – a title Musk has held for almost a year – when shares in Oracle rose by 40 percent, valuing Ellison’s fortune at $393bn, just ahead of Musk’s $384bn. But what’s $9bn between friends?
When you’re as competitive as Larry Ellison, quite a lot. The one thing on which all those who know Ellison, and Ellison himself agrees, is that he likes to win.
An enthusiastic yachtsman, Ellison has demonstrated his commitment to victory by spending an $875m – a drop in the ocean by his standards – on the Oracle racing team, which has twice won the Americas Cup.
But it is his zero-sum approach to business, vanquishing rivals at all costs – including Bill Gates; “Bill and I used to be friends,” he once said, “in so much as Bill has friends” – that has ensured his rise to the become the world’s richest man.
His latest target is British. He has now planted his flag in Oxford, in a bid to transform the city into the new Silicon Valley.
As part of the American invasion of Oxfordshire – which in recent times has included visits from both JD Vance and Beyonce – in July Ellison announced that he has established a major new research institute in Oxford, the Ellison Institute of Technology, in what he has described as a “transformative strategic alliance” with Oxford University, “centered on collaboration” to accelerate innovation across EIT’s four Humane Endeavours: health and medical science; food security and sustainable agriculture; climate change and clean energy and government innovation in the age of artificial intelligence.
The Institute is based at the Oxford Science Park, on the southern edge of the city, in a 300,000 sq ft campus designed by the superstar architect Sir Norman Foster (Ellison aspired to be an architect in his youth). Built at a reported cost of more than $1.3bn, and due to be completed in 2027, it will include research laboratories, an oncology and preventative care clinic, supercomputing facilities and educational and meeting spaces.
It is staffed by a stellar leadership team, drawn from across Oxford, Cambridge and other British academic institutions – the very brightest and the best, as one might expect. Some staff have, it has been reported, moved from the smaller Silicon Valley hub but the expectation as the Institute grows is that Oxford’s most gifted talents are recruited.
Ellison has said he will be concentrating the resources of the Institute on the mission of solving “some of humanity’s most challenging and enduring problems”, by designing and distributing a new generation of life-saving drugs, combating world hunger by engineering higher yielding crops and building a global network of low-cost indoor growing systems, and slowing climate change by developing efficient clean energy generation and storage systems.
EIT will provide about 20 full scholarships at Oxford each year, to undergraduate and postgraduate students from around the world each year, for study at the university – a generous offering for the individuals which won’t make too large a dent on the institute’s coffers.
The Institute is a major investment for Ellison, who in December 2024 paid a further $220m to a Hong Kong listed investor Chinese Estates to buy a property in the very well-appointed St James Square as the London headquarters of EIT.
As part of his plan to solve “some of humanity’s most challenging and enduring problems”, he has also bought… an Oxford pub. But we’ll return to that later.
In 2010, along with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg and others, Ellison was a signatory to the Giving Pledge, signifying that he intended to donate 95 percent of his fortune to charitable causes before he dies.
An underlying principle of the Giving Pledge was that money would be donated to non-profit organizations tackling a range of global problems.
But in a post on X in July, Ellison said he was “amending my giving pledge,” saying ‘there are additional ways that I would like to invest my time and resources in giving back to the world we share.”
Since 2010 the dial has shifted away from billionaires backing not-for-profit companies towards the view, put by the billionaire Marc Andreessen in his 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, that “technological innovation in a market-system is inherently philanthropic” – an argument with which Elon Musk agrees.
In an interview with TED in 2022, Musk, who has also signed the Giving Pledge, said that his companies “SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and the Boring Company are philanthropy.”
Over the years, through the Larry Ellison Foundation, Ellison has reportedly donated more than $800m to medical research, Covid relief and governance.
In 2016 he donated $200m to the University of Southern California to create a cancer treatment and research center. But Ellison has said that the record of the non-profit sector at at “solving the big problems isn’t fantastic,” and EIT is a for-profit organization, which Ellison has said will build “commercial companies for public good” and “commit long-term funding to scale these entities, reinvesting the profits” into the Institute.
Where It All Began
The connection between Oxford University and EIT – which Ellison founded in California in 2009 – goes back to the time of the Covid pandemic, when the university worked with Oracle on a system for quickly identifying coronavirus variants.
In 2023 Ellison had the idea of establishing a research institute in the city. He was encouraged by Professor Sir John Bell, who was then Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, and had worked with Oracle on its coronavirus project. Bell, a former Rhodes scholar, proved to be a fruitful colleague for Ellison. In March, Bell, 72, stepped down from his University post, which he had held for 22 years, to become President of EIT.
Both Oxford University and EIT declined to comment for this piece. But in an interview with The Times earlier this year, Bell described EIT as an organization that was “trying to build a set of scaled companies addressing big global challenges in healthcare, food security, green energy and the like. And that’s actually quite different because the usual models are you have a charity, you give out grants or you give money to a university and let them sort it out.”
Bell, who is also chairman of Immunocore, the Nasdaq-listed biotech company spun out of Oxford University, described becoming President of EIT as “probably the highest risk thing I’ve ever done. And in many ways, if we make it work, it will be the biggest achievement I’ve been able to do”.
Job apparently done, last week Bell stepped down as President of EIT, issuing a statement saying, “I think we have done a very good in identifying programs (sic) and bringing in the best scientists to tackle them,” adding that he is “very happy now to pass the next phase of the Institute” onto the new President, Dr Santa J Ono, a Canadian-American former President of Michigan University.
Early Years
Ellison was born in New York in 1944, to a single mother who, unable to cope, gave him into the care of her uncle and aunt, Louis and Lillian Ellison.
He did not learn his own birth story until he was 12, when he recalled his father saying matter-of-factly, “We’re having meatloaf for dinner and by the way, you were adopted.” His relationship with Louis, whose most persistent refrain to his adopted son is said to have been “you’ll never amount to anything”, was fractious.
At school, Ellison, by all accounts, was a truculent pupil, thinking he was smarter than his teachers. If a property portfolio worth more than $1bn is a measure of smartness, this indeed turned out to be the case: Ellison owns homes in California, New York, Florida and Tuscany, and owns 98 percent of the sixth largest of the Hawaiian islands, Lana’i, which he purchased for $300m dollars in 2012, and where he now lives full time, and which his company Pulama Lana’i is working to transform into a “health and wellness utopia”.
When somebody told Ellison that he would look back and see his school years as the best years of his life he supposedly replied “if that’s true I’m gonna kill myself right now”.
He went on to attend the University of Illinois, as a pre-med student, withdrawing before final exams because of the death of his adoptive mother. He then attended the University of Chicago, dropping out after one term.
After a decade spent as a jobbing computer programmer, in 1977, along with two partners, he founded Software Development Laboratories on an investment of $2,000, $1,200 of which was Ellison’s own money. And in 1983 the company changed its name to Oracle, after its principal product, Oracle Database, a multi-model database management system.
Ellison has been described as “obsessive”, “a bombastic show-off” of “unquenchable optimism” and almost messianic self belief, “a lunatic, but a lunatic with a vision”, who believes that “everyone’s wrong except him”.
He has been married six times, once ascribing the failure of his first two marriages to “my self indulged, without compromise, mode of living.”
He is a long-term supporter of Donald Trump, and has repeatedly appeared at White House events during the US president’s second term. Trump has described Ellison as “an amazing man”, who is more than just a tech pioneer. “He’s sort of CEO of everything.”
That “everything” is coming to seem particularly apt.
Oracle built its reputation on developing database management software, but in recent times it has become a leading player in cloud computing, which involves constructing vast data centers to rent out high-powered IT capacity to companies.
Oracle runs more than 160 such centers around the world, and is pouring billions of dollars into building 100 more; there are six in the UK. In March, Ellison announced that Oracle was on schedule to double its data center capacity this calendar year, saying that customer demand was at record levels. “Our Database MultiCloud revenue from Microsoft, Google and Amazon is up 92 percent in the last three months alone,” he said.
The jump in Oracle’s share price last week follows the company’s announcement last Tuesday that its ‘remaining performance obligations’ – deals it had signed that would lead to future sales – had reached $455bn, up from $138bn three months earlier.
In March, Ellison also announced that Oracle will invest $5bn in Britain over the next five years, separate from his investment from EIT, to meet the “rapidly growing demand for its cloud services” in the country and help the British government deliver on its vision for artificial intelligence innovation and adoption.
Oracle’s $5bn investment, it is said, will provide businesses and the public sector with “cutting-edge cloud infrastructure” that will drive productivity, enhance security, and unlock new opportunities for growth.
In January Keir Starmer spoke of transforming the UK into “one of the great AI superpowers”, saying the technology could increase the UK’s productivity by 1.5 percent a year, potentially adding $58bn to the economy each year over a decade.
“The UK is determined to lead the world in AI innovation,” the then technology secretary Peter Kyle said, following Oracle’s announcement of investment, adding “By working with global tech leaders like Oracle, we’re cementing the UK’s position at the forefront of the AI revolution,” Kyle added.
The “Game-Changer”
Ellison has been a particularly generous supporter of Sir Tony Blair, donating an estimated $375m to the non-profit Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), which Blair set up eight years ago in order to “help governments and leaders to get things done” by advising on strategy, policy and delivery, and “unlocking the power of technology across all three”.
The relationship between Ellison and Blair dates back to Blair’s premiership, when Oracle became a government IT provider. It continues to run the financial and planning software in a number of departments, including HM Treasury and the MoD.
A personal friendship between the two men was forged on Blair’s holidays aboard Ellison’s superyacht in the Mediterranean. Last year Blair and his wife Cherie were guests on the 88-metre-long Musashi, valued at $160m, on a trip that cruised from Sardinia to Amalfi.
When Time magazine included Ellison among their 100 Most Influential People of 2024, it was Blair who proved a fulsome tribute, describing Oracle as “the custodian of a staggering portion of the world’s data,” and Ellison as a man with “the mind of an engineer, the curiosity of a thousand cats and the humility to keep learning – which is the chief characteristic of the true changemaker.”
Blair, who graduated from Oxford in 1975, is named as one of the Faculty Fellows and Senior Leadership at the EIT. He has become an evangelist for AI, describing it as the one “game-changer” that could save the British economy, boosting economic growth and transforming healthcare, saving the Government $40bn a year.
At the World Government Summit, held in Dubai in February, in the session titled “Reimagining Technology for Government”, Blair interviewed Ellison about the growing role of AI, in which Ellison described the AI revolution as “a much bigger deal than the industrial revolution, electricity, everything that’s gone before”.
Ellison espoused the benefits of the technology to increase food production by better predicting crop yields, and improve health by tailoring treatment to individual patients’ needs. This involves harvesting and storing data including economic and genomic data. “We need to unify all the national data, put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like. That’s the missing link,” he said.
Talking to a meeting of financial analysts last September, Ellison elaborated on AI’s all-encompassing power and its possibilities for law enforcement, through the use of constant real-time machine-learning-powered monitoring. He described police body cameras that would be constantly on, with no ability for officers to disable the feed to Oracle.
“The police will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on,” he told analysts. AI would be trained to monitor officer feeds for anything untoward, which Ellison said could prevent abuse of police power and save lives.
The possibilities arising from this have alarmed civil liberty campaigners, who fear an unprecedented era of mass surveillance. Last September Oracle settled a privacy class action in America involving approximately 220 million people, that claimed the company is a “virtual panopticon” that has vision on virtually everything ascertainable in electronic form about Class members, from where they live, to the media they consume, to the things they buy, to the views they hold.” The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, who were party to the class action, cited the example of the Oracle database containing information on a German man, who used a prepaid debit card to place a 10 Euro bet on an esports betting site.
The action further alleged that Oracle illegally sold personal data to other parties. Oracle denied all wrongdoing, but agreed to pay $115m to settle the claims.
Oxford Ties
The most unlikely part of Ellison’s plan to put his stamp on Oxford is his purchase of one of its most historic and best loved pubs. In 2023, EIT reportedly paid the eye-watering sum of $10.8m for the Eagle and Child, in the center of the city, which is being restored by Foster + Partners.
The pub, which first opened in 1684, closed its doors in March 2020 because of the pandemic and has never reopened. Until its closure, its most famous feature was the wooden plaque in the back room, known as the Rabbit Room, commemorating the literary group known as the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles William, who would meet there regularly to socialize and discuss their work.
It was here, when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings to the assembled company, that the academic Hugh Dyson is said to have remarked, “not another f------ elf”.
In one of the group’s last meetings, Lewis distributed literary proofs for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
One graduate student who drank regularly in the Grade II listed pub – more colloquially known in the city as the “the Bird and Bastard” and “the Bird and Baby” – in more recent years remembers it not for the elevated literary discourse but for its “cantankerous landlord – although given the state of most of us I can’t blame him” and the stench from the lavatories in the passageway, where drinkers were obliged to take their pints when the tiny bar was overcrowded.
Ellison bought the pub from St John’s College – co-incidentally, Blair’s old college – with a pledge to refurbish and reopen it as a place where technologists and university scholars can come to meet and exchange ideas – as well, of course, as to drink. The pub’s menu will also, apparently, become rather more refined.
As students start returning to Oxford’s dreaming spires, they may well feel inclined to raise a glass to the man who is putting the University firmly on the global technology map. But one man is unlikely to be joining them.
Ellison reportedly spent time in Oxford this summer and, a source told The Times, is a “lot more hands-on than he was before”. But it seems that may not extend to joining them in a drink at the Eagle and Child. He is teetotal.
Mick Brown is a British journalist and the author of Richard Branson: The Inside Story
