BPL

Larry Ellison

Forbes rank #6
Net worth
$189.0B
Age
82
Country
United States
Industry
Technology
Wealth type
Founder
Background
STEM

Documented facts

Verifiable against the sources below

Wealth and source

Oracle equity

Oracle
Self-made status
self-made
Figure as of
22 August 2026

Education

  1. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    Pre-medicine

    None · Left without completing · 1964

  2. University of Chicago

    Physics and Mathematics

    None (one term) · Left without completing · 1966

Educationhigh

Career

  1. 1970sProgrammer at Amdahl and Ampex, including a CIA database project code-named 'Oracle'.
  2. 1977Co-founded Software Development Laboratories, which became Oracle.
  3. 1977–2014CEO of Oracle.
  4. 2014–Chairman and Chief Technology Officer.

Interpretation

Our reading of public evidence — not private psychological fact

Skill stack

inferred
softwaresalesfinanceleadership

A categorisation of a documented career, not a measured assessment. Hover any skill for its definition.

Work philosophy

inferred

Public record centres on competitive intensity and a long personal involvement in Oracle's technical direction. Specific working habits are not well documented; treated as thin.

Mental models

inferredlow

  • Capital allocation

    Oracle's growth for two decades ran through large debt-funded acquisitions — PeopleSoft (2005), Sun Microsystems (2010), Cerner (2022) — a consistently stated strategy of buying installed customer bases rather than building into them.

  • Economies of scale

    Consolidating acquired enterprise software onto a common sales and support organisation is the publicly argued source of Oracle's margins.

  • Systems thinking

    Oracle's 'engineered systems' strategy — selling hardware and database software tuned to each other as one stack — was publicly framed as owning the whole stack rather than a layer of it.

Each model is listed only where a specific piece of public evidence supports it. The evidence line is what you should judge — the label is just an index into it.

Public business philosophy

Bet the company early on the relational database as a commercial product, then grew by consolidating enterprise software. Publicly competitive framing — market position defined relative to named rivals.

Public ideology

inferredlow

Little consistent public ideological writing. Not enough public evidence to characterise; left deliberately sparse.

Sources

Grouped by the field each source supports.

Most similar in this dataset

Ranked by shared wealth type and industry, then by overlap in skills and mental models.

Michael Dell

$236.2B · Technology

Both founders; both in Technology; shared models: capital allocation, economies of scale, systems thinking

Jeff Bezos

$266.6B · Technology

Both founders; both in Technology; shared models: capital allocation, economies of scale, systems thinking

Sergey Brin

$260.0B · Technology

Both founders; both in Technology; shared models: systems thinking

Similarity is computed from the fields in this dataset only. Two people can share every field here and have had completely different starting conditions.