The tech titan who defined 2025: Larry Ellison, not Elon Musk

When the year began, a billionaire with close ties to the White House was a lock for the most newsworthy tech titan of 2025. But 12 chaotic months later, Larry Ellison, not Elon Musk, can justifiably lay claim to the title.

The 81-year-old Oracle Corp co-founder and chairman has been omnipresent — playing a role in just about every major business story of the year, from the frenzied artificial intelligence boom (or bubble) to the megadeals that are roiling Hollywood.

Oracle even plans to take a stake in TikTok as part of a somewhat tortured plan to help Donald Trump save the popular video app.

Along the way, Ellison’s fortune waxed and waned with Oracle’s stock price — a fever line for a volatile era.

Read: TikTok buyers to include Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen

The year began with Stargate, perhaps the most audacious data center project of them all. On 21 January, a day after Trump’s inauguration, the president appeared at the White House with Ellison, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank Group Corp chief Masayoshi Son to announce a $500 billion plan to build AI infrastructure.

Many superlatives were spilled that day — 100 000 jobs! — and some skeptics considered the vast sum aspirational.

Oracle has since embarked on a historic build-out of data centers optimized for AI that’s proceeding faster than some expected. The endeavor caused the company’s cash flow to go negative for the first time since the early 1990s. But Ellison, who famously passed on the cloud computing revolution 15 years ago, is suddenly an AI guy.

Read:
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In the summer, OpenAI inked a deal worth some $300 billion to rent a massive amount of computing from Oracle, setting up the leading AI lab to become Oracle’s largest customer.

Investors swooned in September when Oracle disclosed the full scale of its OpenAI business.

Ellison’s net worth jumped $89 billion in a day to $388 billion, the largest one-day increase recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That briefly made him the richest person in the world, surpassing Musk.

His ballooning fortune segued nicely with his son David’s aspirations of becoming a Hollywood mogul. In August, David Ellison’s Skydance Media finally closed a deal to win control of Paramount, an acquisition financed largely by Ellison Senior.

Weeks after closing the Paramount deal, David Ellison turned his gaze to Warner Bros. Discovery Inc, offering to take over the home of Batman, Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny. His father offered to help finance the deal and personally pitched to Warner Bros executives.

David Ellison during the Bloomberg Screentime event in Los Angeles in October. Image: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

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It was to no avail. Warner Bros turned down Paramount Skydance’s bid and accepted one from Netflix Inc instead. The younger Ellison replied with a hostile offer — a move his father pulled in the early 2000s to buy software company PeopleSoft.

Read/listen:
Warner Bros urges investors to reject ‘inferior’ Paramount bid
How Netflix beat Paramount to win over Warner Bros
Paramount Skydance’s first 100 days

Paramount’s second bid was rejected, with Warner Bros casting doubt the company could deliver on the equity portion of its offer. In response, Larry Ellison agreed to personally guarantee $40.4 billion in financing.

That’s a lot of money, even for him. In recent months, Ellison’s fortune has dwindled — mirroring a slump in Oracle’s share price.

Many investors have become skeptical about AI spending in general and consider Oracle especially vulnerable compared with its peers because it has accumulated so much debt to finance its data-center building spree and is counting on OpenAI for a massive chunk of its future business.

Ellison is currently the fifth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of just less than $250 billion. So, he has sufficient assets to meet the guarantee many times over. However, his high concentration in Oracle stock means it’s unclear how much cash he’d be able to immediately deploy were he called on to provide the full $40.4 billion backstop, raising the possibility that he might resort to selling stock or pledging additional shares.

Before 2025, Ellison used his money mostly to collect trophies — including planes, sailboats, Malibu real estate and much of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He dabbled in Hollywood by backing his kids’ movies. Now his fortune is tied to the fiercely contested AI market and a still-unproven, debt-laden media company led by his son.

© 2025 Bloomberg

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