Larry Ellison Biography 2026: The $152B Oracle Fortune

Last updated: November 9, 2026 · By Nathan Cole

Larry Ellison is 82 years old in 2026, and his life reads like a dare the world lost. Born to a 19-year-old single mother in the Bronx, given up for adoption after a bout of pneumonia at nine months old, raised by an aunt and uncle in Chicago who told him he would never amount to anything — he dropped out of two universities, moved to California with no degree, and built a company from $2,000 that became one of the largest software businesses on earth. Oracle made him a billionaire, and in September 2025 it briefly made him the richest person alive.

The numbers frame the story. Ellison’s net worth in 2026 is estimated at about $152 billion, per Forbes’ real-time ranking on November 5, 2026 — a figure that looks modest only because, fourteen months earlier, it had touched roughly $393 billion. On September 10, 2025, Oracle’s stock jumped about 36 percent in a single day on artificial-intelligence cloud contracts, and Ellison passed Elon Musk in the Bloomberg ranking during trading. He was, for part of that day, the wealthiest person in the world. Musk was back on top by the close, and Oracle’s slide since has cut more than $200 billion from Ellison’s fortune. This page traces the full arc — the adoption, the dropouts, the $2,000 bet, the acquisitions, the AI surge, the marriages, and the children who now run Hollywood studios — with every figure tied to a named source and a date.

Ellison has never been a quiet billionaire. He bought 98 percent of a Hawaiian island, won the America’s Cup twice, put $1 billion into Tesla and sat on its board, and backed his son’s studio through its takeover of Paramount. He has also been married five times, pledged to give away at least 95 percent of his fortune, and spent four decades running the same company. The biography below gives the whole picture, not just the net worth.

Larry Ellison: Quick Facts

Larry Ellison Net Worth in 2026: About 2 Billion

Larry Ellison’s net worth in 2026 is estimated at about $152 billion. Forbes’ real-time billionaire ranking had him at $152.5 billion on November 5, 2026 — the day he dropped out of its top 10 — and DaveManuel.com, which values his holdings share by share, put him at $152.1 billion at the November 6, 2026 close. The two trackers agree because they are measuring the same thing on the same week: Oracle’s share price, which is where almost all of his money sits.

The spread between $152 billion and $173 billion is not a disagreement about Ellison’s assets. It is a disagreement about the day the price was taken. Oracle’s stock has been falling hard through the autumn of 2026 — down roughly 65 percent from its record close, per DaveManuel.com — and a fortune built on one stock falls with it. Forbes’ annual list, published March 10, 2026, still had him at $190 billion and sixth in the world. By November, the same ranking had him outside the top 10. The honest way to report a fortune like this is as a range with dates, which is what this page does.

One more thing the trackers agree on: the published estimates do not deduct personal loans, because the size of Ellison’s borrowing has never been disclosed. DaveManuel.com states that plainly in its methodology, and it is worth repeating here. The $152 billion is a gross estimate of his holdings, not a bank balance, and the number on any given day is a snapshot of Oracle’s share price as much as a measure of the man.

Early Life: The Bronx, Pneumonia, and Chicago

Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in New York City, to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unmarried Jewish woman. His biological father was an Italian-American pilot in the United States Army Air Corps. Ellison never knew either of them as parents. At nine months old he contracted pneumonia, and his mother sent him to Chicago to be raised by her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted him and gave him their name.

The Ellisons lived in Chicago’s South Shore neighbourhood, a middle-class Reform Jewish household where synagogue attendance was regular and the boy was expected to attend too. Ellison refused a bar mitzvah at 13 and has described himself ever since as a religious skeptic — raised in the faith, never a believer in it. The more important fact about the household was the relationship with his adoptive father. Louis Ellison, an accountant, told his son repeatedly that he would never amount to anything. Ellison has quoted the line for decades, and it is the closest thing his biography has to an origin story: the man who became the world’s richest person for a day grew up being told he would be nothing.

His adoptive mother was the opposite influence. Ellison was close to Lillian, and her death in 1964 is the event that bent his education out of shape. He was a strong science student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he had enrolled in 1962 to study mathematics and physics, and he was named Science Student of the Year as a sophomore. Then Lillian died, and he left the university without taking his final examinations. He never went back to finish a degree — at Illinois, at the University of Chicago, where he studied briefly in 1966, or anywhere else.

The Dropout Years: California and the CIA Database

Ellison moved to California in 1966 with no degree and no plan beyond programming. He worked a series of short jobs, learning the trade by doing it, and landed at Ampex, the electronics company, where he was assigned to develop a database for the Central Intelligence Agency. It was the first time he worked on the problem that would make him rich: how to store and retrieve large amounts of structured information.

In 1976 he became vice president of research and development at Precision Instruments, a small company in the same field. He stayed a year. The job gave him a title and a salary, but it also gave him a clear view of the opportunity he was about to take for himself: the database business was being built by big companies selling expensive, proprietary systems, and a small team with the right idea could undercut them.

The idea came from a paper. In 1970, IBM researcher Edgar F. Codd had published “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” arguing that databases should be organised as tables with rows and columns, queried in a standard language. IBM itself never built a commercial product from it. Ellison read the paper, saw the opening, and in 1977 left Precision Instruments to build the product IBM had not bothered to ship.

The ,000 Bet: Founding Oracle

In June 1977, Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates founded Software Development Laboratories with $2,000 of their own money — $1,200 from Ellison, $800 from Oates. The company did contract programming to pay the rent while Ellison built the database. Two years later, in 1979, it released Oracle Version 2, the first commercially available relational database in the world. There was no Version 1. The numbering was a sales decision: nobody buys the first version of a database, so they shipped the second.

The product worked, and the timing was perfect. Businesses in the late 1970s were drowning in data they could not query, and a database you could ask questions of in plain structured language was a genuine breakthrough. The company renamed itself Relational Software in 1979 and Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982, and Ellison — who had been the architect of the idea and held the majority stake — drove it with a sales culture that became famous for its aggression. Oracle went public in March 1986. Ellison was 41, and he was already rich. The fortune that followed was a matter of compounding the same advantage for four decades.

Ellison stayed chief executive for 37 years, from 1977 until September 2014, when he stepped down and moved into the roles he still holds: executive chairman and chief technology officer. The handover was orderly — Safra Catz and Mark Hurd became co-CEOs — and it was not a retirement. Ellison kept the largest shareholding, about 41 percent of the company, and kept the technology job. He had always been the product mind at Oracle; the title change made that official.

Building the Empire: The Acquisitions That Made Oracle Unavoidable

Ellison’s second great skill, after building the database, was buying the companies around it. Oracle’s growth in the 2000s and 2010s was driven by a series of hostile and friendly takeovers that turned a database vendor into a full-stack enterprise software giant — applications, middleware, hardware, and finally cloud infrastructure.

The PeopleSoft fight defined the approach. Ellison pursued the rival applications company for eighteen months against a board that did not want to sell, and closed the deal at about $10.3 billion in January 2005. The Sun acquisition in 2010 was the more consequential one: it gave Oracle the Java programming language, which runs a vast share of the world’s enterprise software, and a hardware business to sell alongside the database. Cerner, at $28.3 billion in 2022, was the biggest cheque Oracle ever wrote, and it moved the company into health-care data — a market Ellison has called the next great database opportunity.

Each purchase added customers who could then be sold the database, the cloud, and the rest of the stack. That is the compounding machine behind Ellison’s fortune: a customer base that only grows, attached to products that are painful to replace. It is also why Oracle’s share price, and Ellison’s net worth with it, moves so sharply on cloud news. The database is the annuity; the cloud is the growth story.

The AI Pivot and the Stargate Project

The growth story arrived in 2025. In January of that year, Oracle was named a founding partner of the Stargate Project, the artificial-intelligence infrastructure initiative launched with OpenAI, SoftBank and the Abu Dhabi fund MGX, intended to invest up to $500 billion in AI data centers in the United States. Oracle’s job was to build and run the infrastructure — the largest construction project in the company’s history, and the reason its cloud business suddenly mattered more than the database.

Ellison, at 81, was the public face of the announcement, standing alongside the project’s partners at the White House. For a man who had spent five decades selling software, it was a new role: builder of the physical infrastructure of the AI era. The market’s reaction was the September surge that made him briefly the world’s richest person — and the autumn slide that cut his fortune by more than half, as investors weighed the enormous cost of building that infrastructure against the revenue it would produce.

Oracle’s headquarters moved with the times too. The company left California for Austin, Texas in 2020, and Ellison announced a further move to Nashville, Tennessee in 2024. The moves tracked the founder: he had already shifted his own base from California to Florida, and the company followed the same logic — lower taxes, cheaper land, room to build.

The Day He Became the World’s Richest Man

September 10, 2025 is the date Ellison’s biography will always be measured against. Oracle reported strong demand for its cloud infrastructure and an optimistic outlook tied to artificial intelligence, and the stock jumped about 36 percent in a single session. During trading, Ellison’s fortune passed Elon Musk’s on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His net worth was put at roughly $393 billion — and on some measures he crossed $400 billion, only the second person in history to do so after Musk himself.

It did not last the day. By the close, Musk was back on top: $384.2 billion to Ellison’s $383.2 billion, per the Bloomberg close reported by DaveManuel.com. Ellison had been the world’s richest person for part of a trading session, and that was all. The episode is worth recording precisely because it was so brief. It showed how much of the modern billionaire ranking is a function of a single share price on a single afternoon — and how quickly the same arithmetic can run in reverse. Fourteen months later, Ellison’s fortune was $152 billion, down about $200 billion from the peak, and Oracle’s stock was roughly 65 percent below its record close.

The comparison with Musk is instructive. Both men built their fortunes on one company, and both fortunes swing by tens of billions on a good or bad week. The difference is the business: Musk’s wealth rides on cars and rockets, Ellison’s on databases and data centers. In September 2025, the data centers won for a day. Since then, the market has punished the cost of building them, and Ellison has paid the price in the rankings.

The .5 Billion Share Sale of 2026

In late June 2026, Ellison adopted a trading plan to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares — worth about $7.5 billion at the prices then prevailing — running through October 24, 2026. The Financial Times reported the plan from Oracle’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it was structured as a 10b5-1 plan, the pre-scheduled arrangement insiders use to sell stock without accusations of trading on inside information.

A sale of that size, by the company’s largest shareholder, is news in itself — and it is also normal. Ellison’s stake is worth more than $100 billion; selling $7.5 billion of it is a small fraction, and the money has obvious uses, from the Ellison Institute of Technology to the family’s media investments. The plan’s existence also explains part of the autumn slide: when the largest shareholder is a scheduled seller, the market notices.

What the sale does not change is the ownership structure. Even after selling 50 million shares, Ellison remains Oracle’s single largest shareholder by a wide margin, and the fortune this article reports is measured after that sale, not before it. The $152 billion of November 2026 is the fortune of a man who has already banked $7.5 billion in cash from the year’s trading plan.

Lanai, Sailing, and the America’s Cup

Ellison’s spending is as famous as his earning, and the two most famous purchases sit at opposite ends of the map. In 2012 he bought 98 percent of Lanai, the sixth-largest Hawaiian island, for about $300 million — not a house on an island, but the island itself, with its hotels, its pineapple fields and its 3,000 residents. He has spent the years since rebuilding it, renovating the Four Seasons resorts and investing in the island’s infrastructure, including a reported plan to make Lanai a model of sustainable living powered by solar energy.

The other purchase was a racing team. Oracle Team USA won the America’s Cup in 2010, beating the Swiss defender Alinghi, and defended it in 2013 in one of the great comebacks in sport: down 8–1 to Team New Zealand, Oracle won eight straight races to keep the cup. Ellison lost it in 2017, when New Zealand took the cup back in Bermuda. The sailing habit is not a hobby in the usual sense — Ellison has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into it across two decades — but it is the one place his competitive streak is visible in public, on the water rather than in a boardroom.

The two purchases say something about the fortune that the balance sheet does not. Ellison’s wealth has never been parked; it has been spent on the things he wants to own outright — an island, a sailing team, a studio. The Lanai purchase, in particular, is the purest expression of the Ellison method: see something undervalued, buy the whole thing, and rebuild it on your own terms.

Hollywood: David, Megan, and the Paramount Takeover

Ellison’s children have built their own empires in the business he never entered. David Ellison, born in 1983, founded Skydance Media in 2010 and turned it into a major film and television studio, co-financing the Mission: Impossible and Top Gun franchises. In August 2025, Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount Global closed, and David became chairman and chief executive of the combined Paramount Skydance — at 42, the head of one of Hollywood’s legacy studios, with his father’s money behind the deal and his own track record in front of it.

Megan Ellison, born in 1986, founded Annapurna Pictures in 2011 and built the most respected independent studio of the decade, financing Zero Dark Thirty, Her and American Hustle — films that won Oscars and lost money in equal measure, and that no other studio would have made. The siblings took opposite paths inside the same industry: David the blockbuster builder, Megan the prestige patron. Both did it with the surname that opened doors and the talent that kept them open.

The family connection matters to the net-worth story because the Skydance-Paramount deal is one of the largest uses of the Ellison fortune outside Oracle. Ellison backed his son’s studio financially for years, and the Paramount acquisition — valued in the billions — is the family’s biggest bet beyond the database. It is also the reason the Ellison name now sits on two of the most important companies in American technology and American entertainment at the same time.

Marriages and Family: Five Weddings and a Quiet Fifth Wife

Ellison has been married five times, and the count itself is a small controversy: some outlets say six, counting a long-term partnership alongside the marriages. The four marriages that ended in divorce are a matter of public record. Adda Quinn, his first wife, was married to him from 1967 to 1974. Nancy Wheeler Jenkins followed, from 1977 to 1978. Barbara Boothe, his third wife, was married to him from 1983 to 1986 and is the mother of David and Megan. Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, was his fourth wife, from 2003 to 2010. Between 2010 and 2020 he was partnered with Nikita Kahn, a relationship that ended without a marriage.

His current wife is Jolin Zhu, also known as Keren Zhu — Chinese-born, a 2012 graduate of the University of Michigan in international studies, and roughly 47 years younger than Ellison. The marriage was never formally announced by either of them. It became public knowledge in late November 2024, when the University of Michigan’s athletic booster group, Champions Circle, publicly thanked “Larry and his wife Jolin” for their support in a major football recruiting deal — a statement that was widely reported and effectively confirmed the marriage. Public records show Ellison registered to vote at the same Florida address as Zhu in 2023, and media outlets now describe her as his wife. The couple were first seen together in public around 2018, and Zhu keeps no social media presence and gives no interviews.

Ellison is 6 ft 3 in (191 cm) tall, a detail that matters only because it surprises people: the database billionaire is one of the tallest men in the tech industry’s history, and the height is recorded in almost every profile of him. He lives mainly in Florida and California, and his Woodside estate in California — a Japanese-inspired compound reported to be worth about $110 million — is one of the most famous private homes in Silicon Valley.

The Giving Pledge and the Ellison Institute

In 2010, Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, the commitment founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, promising to give away at least 95 percent of his wealth. The pledge is not a donation; it is a promise, and Ellison has spent the years since building the vehicle for it. The Ellison Institute of Technology, based at Oxford, is the main instrument — a research institute focused on medical science, with cancer and ageing among its priorities, funded by Ellison’s money and run on his conviction that the database mind can be applied to biology.

The institute is the closest thing Ellison has to a legacy project outside Oracle. He has said little about it in public, and the institute itself publishes less than a university would. What is known is the scale: the commitment is measured in billions, the research is long-term, and the model is Ellison’s own — hire the best people, give them the best tools, and do not ask them to show quarterly results. It is the Oracle method applied to medicine, and it is where a large share of the $152 billion is eventually headed.

The pledge also puts the net-worth figure in perspective. A fortune that will mostly be given away is a different thing from a fortune that will be inherited, and Ellison’s children — who have built their own companies — have never been presented as heirs waiting for a payout. The $152 billion is, in Ellison’s own accounting, a sum in transit: from Oracle’s shareholders to the institute’s laboratories.

Larry Ellison Net Worth History

The fortune’s shape is a long climb, a sudden spike, and a sharp fall — and the table below uses only figures with a named outlet and a date.

The table’s lesson is that the fortune was built slowly and lost quickly. From $107 billion to $192 billion took two years of steady Oracle growth. The jump to $393 billion took one day of AI euphoria. The fall to $152 billion took fourteen months of investors repricing the cost of the AI buildout. Readers who see a $393 billion headline from 2025 should read the table first: that number is history, and the current figure is $152 billion.

How Larry Ellison Compares to Other Tech Billionaires

Ellison’s $152 billion puts him among the ten richest people in the world, but the company he keeps is instructive. Elon Musk’s biography shows a fortune that has stayed above $380 billion through the same period — Musk regained the top spot on the very day Ellison took it, and has kept a substantial lead since. Jeff Bezos’ biography shows the Amazon founder at around $370 billion in October 2026, a fortune that has proved more durable than Ellison’s because Amazon’s revenue is less concentrated in a single bet. Mark Zuckerberg, whose fortune was estimated at $222 billion by Forbes in March 2026, sits between them.

The comparison that matters most is the one with his own past. Ellison was sixth in the world in March 2026 at $190 billion; by November he was outside the top 10 at $152 billion. No other billionaire in the top 10 lost as much, as fast, in 2026 — because no other billionaire’s fortune is as concentrated in a single stock facing a single question. Oracle’s question is whether the AI infrastructure buildout will pay for itself. The market’s answer, so far, has been to sell first and ask later.

Why the Net Worth Figures Differ Across Sites

Three numbers circulate for Larry Ellison in late 2026 — $152 billion, $164 billion and $173 billion — and all three are correct, because they were taken on different days. Forbes’ real-time figure was $152.5 billion on November 5, 2026. Bloomberg’s was $164 billion as reported on November 3. Parade’s $172.6 billion was the Forbes figure from October 30. Oracle’s share price fell sharply in the week between them, and each tracker is a photograph of a different afternoon.

The older, higher figures still in circulation — $190 billion from the March 2026 Forbes list, $393 billion from the September 2025 peak — are stale, not wrong for their time. The $393 billion figure is the most misused number in Ellison coverage: it appears in headlines written months after the fact, presented as though it were current. It was current for part of one day. This article leads with $152 billion because that is the November 2026 figure, and it keeps the $393 billion in its place: a dated peak, in a dated table, with the date attached.

Sources & Reporting

The $152 billion anchor comes from Forbes’ real-time billionaire ranking (November 5, 2026, $152.5 billion) and DaveManuel.com’s sum-of-the-parts estimate ($152.1 billion at Oracle’s November 6, 2026 close of $116.10), with Bloomberg’s $164 billion (as reported November 3, 2026) and Parade’s $172.6 billion (October 30, 2026) published as the range. The $393 billion peak and the September 10, 2025 richest-person episode are reported by Bloomberg and Forbes via DaveManuel.com and Britannica Money; the Forbes World’s Billionaires List figures (2023 $107B, 2024 $141B, 2025 $192B, 2026 $190B) come from DaveManuel.com’s compilation of the Forbes lists. The biography facts — the August 17, 1944 birth, the adoption by Lillian and Louis Ellison, the South Shore upbringing, the University of Illinois departure after his adoptive mother’s death, the Ampex CIA database work, the $2,000 SDL founding with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, Oracle Version 2 in 1979, the 1986 IPO, the 2014 step-down to executive chairman and CTO — come from Wikipedia, Britannica Money and EBSCO’s Research Starters biography. The Stargate Project details are from Wikipedia and Britannica Money; the $7.5 billion share-sale plan (50 million shares, 10b5-1 plan adopted late June 2026, through October 24, 2026) is from the Financial Times via SEC filings as reported by Billionaires.Africa. The Lanai purchase (~$300 million, 2012, 98 percent), the America’s Cup wins (2010, 2013), the Tesla board tenure (2018–2022) and the Giving Pledge (2010, 95 percent) are from CEO.wiki and Wikipedia. The Jolin Zhu marriage — the Michigan Champions Circle confirmation of November 2024, the 2012 University of Michigan degree, the 47-year age gap — is reported by CEO Today Magazine, TheCityCeleb and AdviceScout; where outlets disagree on whether she is his fifth or sixth wife, this article names the disagreement rather than picking a side. The salary figure ($950,000 base in fiscal 2026) comes from Oracle’s 2026 proxy statement as reported by Parade. Reporting window: November 9, 2026. Where sources disagree, this article publishes the range and names the disagreement. Figures that could not be verified from a named source were left out. Corrections can be sent via the contact page, and this article will be updated if new reporting changes any figure.

Larry Ellison Biography: Frequently Asked Questions