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DEATH DOESN’TAIAIAICIANASACEOMAGAYour browser does not support the element. make sense to Larry Ellison. Especially if it is premature like that of his doting adoptive mother, of kidney cancer when he was 20 years old. Even mere ageing is an irritant to the co-founder of Oracle. The 80-year-old tech billionaire simply has no time for it. He is too busy calling the shots at the business-software giant he started in 1977 and jostling for a spot in Silicon Valley’s race into the future, powered by daily workouts, fish, green tea and a fridgeful of self-belief.The past few weeks have been full of ups and downs for Mr Ellison. On January 21st he stood next to Sam Altman, an artificial-intelligence wunderkind, and Masayoshi Son, a hyperactive Japanese tech investor, as President Donald Trump unveiled the “Stargate” project to keep America First in by building vast data centres to house cutting-edge models, such as those of Open, Mr Altman’s $157bn startup. The cloud infrastructure would be provided not by Microsoft, hitherto Open’s exclusive cloud partner, but by Oracle. The market value of Mr Ellison’s firm surged by nearly $40bn, to $522bn. His personal fortune, derived primarily from his 41% stake in Oracle, exceeded $210bn.Then came the stumble, when a whizzy Chinese firm called DeepSeek shook investors’ belief in the need for Stargate-sized number-crunching—and in Oracle’s valuation. Even so, Mr Ellison remains the world’s fifth-richest man, and Oracle the third-biggest software firm. He has a thing or two to teach fellow tech titans, in particular his friend Elon Musk, about staying power. And it isn’t all about diet and exercise.Messrs Ellison and Musk have plenty in common besides fabulous wealth and what appears to be genuine mutual affection. They have shared commercial interests. Between 2018 and 2022 Mr Ellison sat on the board of Tesla, Mr Musk’s electric-car company, and at one point owned a 1.5% stake. He also chipped in $1bn when Mr Musk was buying Twitter, which he has since rechristened X. On January 28th Oracle announced a partnership with SpaceX, Mr Musk’s rocketry firm, to offer business software via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.Both men are technologists with an eye for the next big thing. In the 1970s Mr Ellison spotted the commercial potential of “relational” databases, which allow users to easily cross-reference digital information, before anyone else; in the 2000s Mr Musk proved similarly farsighted about electric cars (with Tesla) and reusable rockets (with SpaceX). Both counted Uncle Sam as an early customer: the for Mr Ellison and for Mr Musk. In recent years both grew frustrated with lefty California and moved their firms’ headquarters to business-friendlier states.Although Oracle and Tesla are listed, each is run like a private business, even if it sometimes upsets Wall Street in the short run. Each came to dominate its market. By 2012 Oracle was selling 43% of all database-management software by value, reckons Gartner, a research firm. A decade later Teslas accounted for one in five of all battery-powered cars bought worldwide.A joke about Oracle’s founder is that the difference between him and God is that the Almighty doesn’t think he is Larry Ellison. Mr Musk relishes comparisons to Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, a Marvel superhero—more apt for someone who prefers comic books to the Bible but no less presumptuous. Neither likes delegating. Although Mr Ellison has handed over the reins to an able lieutenant, Safra Catz, the closest he has to a true succession plan is funding anti-ageing research. Mr Musk is a micromanager to the bone. And neither is gracious about rivals, though Mr Ellison’s squabbles with Bill Gates in the 2000s, when Oracle and Microsoft vied for enterprise-software supremacy, now look gentlemanly compared with Mr Musk’s expletive-filled rants on X against anyone who disagrees with him on anything.This points to the first big difference between the two, one which Mr Musk should note if he wishes to keep going strong in the 2050s, when he is Mr Ellison’s age. The younger mogul is easily distracted. He has spread himself thin between cars, rockets, X (as owner and power user), a tunnels business and a computer-brain-interface firm, plus a side hustle of streamlining the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Mr Trump. Mr Ellison, by contrast, displays a singleminded devotion to Oracle.This has come at the cost of his relationships—a handful of marriages ended in divorce—and philanthropic endeavours, one of which was run for a time by a writer at . But it has worked for Oracle, which despite recent wobbles is worth nearly three times as much as in the late 2010s, when Mr Ellison returned to arrest its slide into irrelevance in the cloud era.Though Oracle’s share of its core database market is down to 17%, behind Microsoft and Amazon, its cloud revenues are growing by over 30% a year, much faster than at its bigger rivals. The firm is in the running to buy TikTok’s American business, which its servers already host, if the app’s overlords in Beijing bless a sale rather than face a Congress-mandated ban.The second lesson is about discretion. Mr Ellison’s brash corporate persona conceals an intensely private man whose non-business views are almost as invisible as his company’s ubiquitous software. His longtime support for Republicans, including Mr Trump, has not made him sworn enemies among Democrats—wise for someone whose firm has lots of public-sector clients. It is easy to imagine a Democratic administration taking issue with Mr Musk, likewise a big government contractor with SpaceX. His journey from blue to red is littered with smouldering bridges beyond repair. But for others, like the 39-year-old Mr Altman, there is still time to learn.
