Larry Ellison Net Worth

Forbes puts Larry Ellison at $159.7 billion on 3 November 2026. Nearly all of it is Oracle stock, a position he has held for almost five decades and has never sold down substantially.

The estimate has moved a great deal in the past two years as investors repriced Oracle as a supplier of cloud capacity for artificial intelligence workloads. A contract announcement can add more to his fortune in a day than most fortunes are worth in total.

Ellison grew up in Chicago and dropped out of the University of Illinois, later moving to California to work as a programmer. In 1977 he and two colleagues founded Software Development Laboratories, which built a relational database for the CIA under the code name Oracle.

The company, renamed Oracle, listed in 1986 and grew through aggressive sales and a string of acquisitions. Ellison was chief executive until 2014, when he moved to the roles of executive chairman and chief technology officer, and he has kept a hand in product decisions throughout.

His other long-running interests include aviation and sailing, and he has owned racing yachts and a fighter jet collection. In 2012 he bought almost all of Lanai, the sixth largest Hawaiian island, and has since invested in its hotels, water systems and renewable power. He also bought the Indian Wells tennis tournament and, for a period, held a seat on Tesla’s board.

Lanai is the largest non-financial asset we count for any person on this list. Ellison bought the island for a reported $300 million and has spent considerably more developing it. We value the holding from the purchase price plus disclosed capital spending, not from an asking price for the island.

He owns homes in Woodside, California, and elsewhere in the United States, and has given to medical research and education, including a large gift to the University of Southern California for cancer research.

Oracle’s share count comes from the latest proxy filing. Private property such as Lanai is valued at disclosed cost, which understates any appreciation but avoids inventing a price. Our approach is set out on the methodology page.