What Companies Does Larry Ellison Own?

Larry Ellison, the American billionaire who co-founded computer software company Oracle in 1977, is one of the wealthiest people in the world.

As of May 6, 2022, Ellison was the seventh richest person in the world, with a net worth of $101.4 billion, according to Forbes.

The 77-year-old venture capitalist draws most of his wealth from his stake in Oracle, which saw its stock price soar over 16% in December, allowing Ellison to surpass the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the world’s richest list for a brief period of time. (So far in 2022, Oracle’s shares have plummeted roughly 18% as turbulence rocks the stock market.)

Ellison has been a prolific investor, and he has a diverse portfolio to show for it. He was an early and fervent supporter of Theranos, the now-defunct biotech company run by Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani that landed them both in court for fraud. His latest endeavor is as a leading investor in Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter; a new SEC filing revealed he wrote Musk a $1 billion check. Other investors in the Twitter deal include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and crypto exchange Binance.

Take a look at a handful of other companies in Ellison’s investment portfolio contributing to his multi-billion dollar net worth.

Oracle

Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 as CEO alongside Ed Oates and Bob Miner, and he grew the startup of three computer programmers into the world’s largest supplier of database software. It was the first company to create a commercially viable relational database, meaning that for the first time, databases of code could be sold for a price. Oracle went public in 1987, but it wasn’t until the launch of Oracle 7 database in 1992 that Ellison propelled to billionaire status. Ellison owns a 35% stake in the company today, which has a market capitalization of nearly $200 billion.

He served as the chief executive until 2014, when interestingly enough, he stepped into a dual role of executive chairman and chief technology officer..

Tesla

Ellison’s latest investment with Elon Musk might not come as a surprise, since he’s been connected with Musk through Tesla since at least 2018. With more than 15 million shares, Ellison is the second-largest individual shareholder of the electric vehicle company behindMusk himself. He bought the shares for an undisclosed amount in 2018 when he joined the board. Ellison’s Tesla stake accounts for 12% of his total fortune, according to Forbes.

NetSuite

In 1998, Evan Goldberg started NetSuite, the world’s first cloud applications company, with funding from Ellison. It went public in 2007 and pioneered SaaS technology as a form of business management.

Oracle acquired NetSuite in 2016 for $9.3 billion, adding $700 million to Ellison’s growing fortune. (He already held a 41.3% stake in the cloud company at the time of the deal.)

Knowledge Universe

With an initial $500 million investment, Ellison founded the for-profit education company Knowledge Universe alongside brothers Lowell and Michael Milken in 1996. Over the next two decades, it invested in a handful of educational companies, including the toymaker LeapFrog Enterprises, which went public in 2002 and raised $117 million in its IPO. LeapFrog would eventually sell to VTech Holdings for $17 million in 2016 after struggling to generate profits for years.

Knowledge Universe renamed itself to KinderCare Education in 2016, intending to open learning development centers across the U.S.

Sensei Ag

In 2020, Ellison announced he would be moving to Lanai, his (almost) private Hawaiian island, to work full-time on his latest venture, Sensei Ag. Founded in 2018 with cancer physician Dr. David Agus, Sensei Ag is an agriculture tech firm with a mission to bring healthy, affordable food to the world through nutrient-rich produce. It primarily aims to lower the barriers of access to vertical or greenhouse farming.

The other part of the business, Sensei Retreats, is based at the Four Seasons Resort in Lanai. It offers customizable experiences to guests focused on improving their sleep, movement and nutrition—with the goal of helping extend their lives.

Real estate holdings

Aside from major stakes in investment companies, Ellison has also amassed a small fortune in real estate. In order to secure near-full ownership of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, Ellison paid $300 million for 87,000 out of the island’s 90,000 acres in 2012. It’s where Sensei Ag is headquartered.

Ellison also has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate holdings in Malibu, California. His total real estate portfolio amounts to $1 billion, and he owns massive properties in posh zipcodes like Palm Beach, Lake Tahoe and Newport, Rhode Island.

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