What is Elon Musk? The tech titan who defined 2025 was Larry Ellison, the fifth richest man in the world. To understand

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The 81-year-old co-founder and chairman of Oracle has been omnipresent, playing a role in virtually every big economic story of the year, from the artificial intelligence (AI) frenzy (or bubble) to the billion-dollar deals rocking Hollywood.

Oracle was even considering buying a stake in TikTok as part of a somewhat devious plan to help Donald Trump save the popular video app. Along the way, Ellison’s fortunes fluctuated with Oracle’s actions, a fever line born of unstable times.

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

Many superlatives were used that day: 100,000 jobs! – and some skeptics saw the gargantuan sum as more ambitious than concrete.

Since then, Oracle has embarked on a historic expansion of AI-optimized data centers, which has progressed faster than expected. The effort pushed the company’s cash flow into negative territory for the first time since the early 1990s. But Ellison, who missed the cloud computing revolution 15 years ago, suddenly became an AI enthusiast.

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Over the summer, OpenAI struck a deal estimated at around $300 billion to lease massive computing capacity from Oracle, putting the leading AI lab on track to become the company’s largest customer.

Investors were excited in September when Oracle revealed the scale of its OpenAI business. Ellison’s net worth jumped $89 billion in a single day to $388 billion — the largest daily increase ever recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This made him, albeit briefly, the richest person in the world, surpassing Musk.

The growing fortune dovetailed well with his son David’s ambitions to become a Hollywood mogul. In August, David Ellison’s Skydance Media finally reached a deal to take control of Paramount, an acquisition largely financed by Ellison Sr.

Weeks after closing the deal with Paramount, David Ellison set his sights on Warner Bros., offering to take over the home of Batman, Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny. His father offered to help finance the deal and personally presented the proposal to Warner Bros. executives.

That didn’t help. Warner Bros. turned down Paramount Skydance’s offer and accepted Netflix Inc.’s offer instead. The younger Ellison responded with a hostile proposal – a move his father had already made in the early 2000s to buy software company PeopleSoft.

Paramount’s second offer was rejected, Warner Bros. questioning the company’s ability to provide the equity portion of the proposal. In response, Larry Ellison agreed to personally guarantee $40.4 billion in funding.

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That’s a lot of money, even for him. In recent months, Ellison’s fortunes have declined, reflecting Oracle’s declining stock price. Many investors have become skeptical of AI spending in general and view Oracle as particularly vulnerable relative to its peers because the company has accumulated a lot of debt to finance its rush into data centers and is relying on OpenAI for a significant portion of its future business.

Ellison is currently the fifth richest person in the world, with a net worth of just under $250 billion. It therefore has enough assets to honor the guarantee several times.

However, its heavy concentration in Oracle shares makes it uncertain how much cash it would be able to raise immediately if it were called upon to offer the full $40.4 billion in support, raising the possibility of having to sell shares or post more securities as collateral.

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Before 2025, Ellison primarily used his money to collect trophies, including airplanes, sailboats, real estate in Malibu and much of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He also flirts with Hollywood by financing his children’s films.