Larry Ellison, not Elon Musk, was the tech titan who defined 2025

NEW YORK – When 2025 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, Mr Larry Ellison, not Mr Elon Musk, can justifiably lay claim to the title.

The 81-year-old Oracle 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 US President Donald Trump save the popular video app.

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

The year began with Stargate, perhaps the most audacious data centre project of them all.

On Jan 21, a day after Mr Trump’s inauguration, the President appeared at the White House with Mr Ellison
, OpenAI’s Mr Sam Altman and SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son to announce a US$500 billion (S$642 billion) plan to build AI infrastructure. Many superlatives were spilled that day – 100,000 jobs! – and some sceptics considered the vast sum aspirational.

Oracle has since embarked on a historic build-out of data centres optimised for AI that is proceeding faster than some expected. The endeavour caused the company’s cash flow to go negative for the first time since the early 1990s.

But Mr Ellison, who famously passed on the cloud computing revolution 15 years ago, is suddenly an AI guy.

In the summer, OpenAI inked a deal worth some US$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.

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

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

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

It was to no avail. Warner Bros turned down
Paramount Skydance’s bid and accepted one from Netflix instead.

The younger Mr Ellison replied with a hostile offer, a move his father pulled in the early 2000s to buy software company PeopleSoft. Paramount’s second bid was rejected, with Warner Bros casting doubt that the company could deliver on the equity portion of its offer.

In response, Mr Larry Ellison agreed to personally guarantee
US$40.4 billion in financing.

That is a lot of money, even for him.

In recent months, Mr Ellison’s fortune has dwindled, mirroring a slump in Oracle’s share price. Many investors have become sceptical 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-centre building spree and is counting on OpenAI for a massive chunk of its future business.

Mr Ellison is currently the fifth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of just less than US$250 billion. So, he has sufficient assets to meet the guarantee many times over.

However, his high concentration in Oracle stock means it is unclear how much cash he would be able to immediately deploy were he called on to provide the full US$40.4 billion backstop, raising the possibility that he might resort to selling stock or pledging additional shares.

Before 2025, Mr 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. BLOOMBERG