He owns an island in Hawaii where the locals work for him as de facto serfs.

He has donated to two charities in his life: one to Stanford in exchange for not admitting fault in an options backdating scandal, and one to set up a charitable foundation to research ways to extend his own life.

The mission statements and internal marching orders at Oracle and his various other companies is "make lots of money for Larry". Nothing else matters, they will screw the users, screw the customers, screw the product, screw the employees, screw the open source community, screw the legal system, as long as there's revenue for Larry, the bosses are happy bacause that's all that the company exists for.

If you go to a major bank and ask "why do you exist", they'll give you a whole spiel about how they help people achieve fiscal stability, they help new businesses get established and bring new products to market, they help people grow their retirement funds, providing services so that the world can be a better place, yada yada yada.

Google will tell you "We help people find information, and we help businesses find an audience for their products, and we make pocket-size computing cheap and available for everyone all over the world, and we hope that the sum of these activities will make the world a better place"

If you go to Oracle and say "why do you exist" they'll simply say "we make money". That's it. They don't have a mission, they're not trying to make the world a better place, they just want to make money.

Public companies, on the other hand, apparently have a legal obligation to make as much money as possible, a feature I find despicable.

https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-fiducia...

> The specific fiduciary duties of corporate directors...are common law: legal principles that have been established by courts in the process of adjudicating cases over the years. As it turns out, in Delaware, which is the state that matters—not only because most large corporations are incorporated there, but because courts in other states tend to look to Delaware law when dealing with new issues of corporate law—there are exactly two fiduciary duties: the duty of loyalty and the duty of care.

> They duty of care is basically the duty to pay attention to your job: in essence, to make decisions on the basis of reasonably adequate information. There is an academic controversy—fueled by careless uses of language by the courts—about whether the standard of conduct is negligence or gross negligence. But the point here is that the duty of care isn’t a duty to do any particular thing, such as maximize profits.

> The duty of loyalty is marginally more complicated. This duty (like the duty of care) existed in agency law—the law governing the relationship between agents, such as employees, and principals, such as companies—before corporations became widespread in the nineteenth century. There, the duty of loyalty essentially meant that you couldn’t use your position as an agent to make a personal profit—by stealing directly from the principal, via a transaction with the principal, or, in the famous case of Reading v. Regem, by using your British Army uniform to help smugglers during your off hours.

"While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires."

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354#OPINION...

No, they don't. Please stop spreading this myth.

Which he has purchased.

He cheaped out on buying the Warriors by, what, $10 million? The franchise has appreciated since by, what, $2 billion?

E.g. Megan Ellison, owner and CEO of Annapurna Pictures, a film producer and executive producer (aka a moneybag) on 35 titles since 2010, including for major directors like Coens, Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wong Kar-wai, Spike Jonze.

Also Annapurna Interactive's game Gorogoa looks pretty interesting, at least visually—haven't tried it yet.

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."

-- Adam Smith

Because the more you have the higher up the scoreboard you move. If you're the 17th richest person in the world, moving into the top 10 is probably a massive motivator, and once you're the 7th richest I bet you lie awake at night scheming how to get into the top 5.

Power over even more other people, for better or for worse.

Was it worth it? Maybe not. Still, it’s a substantial amount.

When I worked as a part time cashier in the midwest, I could notice $5 missing from my account. In fact I did notice an errant $7 charge. I didn’t have to be particularly vigilant, just, there wasn’t that much money flowing through my account.

As an engineer in the Bay Area, I could miss a $100 transaction. Not saying I would necessarily, but looking at month to month finances, nothing would really look too out of the ordinary. It could fade into the noise.

Of course this has mostly to do with the amount of money flowing through accounts, but I am pretty sure that if 4 billion dollars disappeared, it would be promptly noticed. That’s still a huge net change, even if month to month finances scaled up linearly with account balance - and I don’t think they do.

I guess that lots of Larry Ellison's wealth is in stocks, which are fluctuating in worth on a constant basis.

Another part of his wealth is real estate, like his Hawaiian island or land for his Japanase-style home in the Bay Area. There the value is only an estimate.

Also I assume most of the day to day handling is in the hands of an accountant and there's constant in and out of sums for paying his personal staff, buying supplies, paying maintenence of his Mig Jet or whatever goes on there.

>Also I assume most of the day to day handling is in the hands of an accountant and there's constant in and out of sums for paying his personal staff, buying supplies, paying maintenence of his Mig Jet or whatever goes on there.

I know nothing about Larry Ellison or this case, but somehow I doubt someone with $65B net worth is not paying attention to their account balances or their investment positions at all. You hire an accountant to take care of the things you don't want to or don't have time to do, but if you have that much money it is apparent that you care about how much money you have.

it's telling that Ellison wouldn't take stock in his own company in the transaction but rather took cash at a valuation that was 10x revenue and Oracle's largest acquisition at the time

He was bailing himself out financially, in ego and also catching Oracle up in the entire cloud shift they missed and failed on with their own early shitty online products

There's a survivorship bias at play, here. People who don't have those kinds of priorities tend to not become stupid rich.

Huh, how ironic would that be, as the company's primary compliance policies urge it's employees against insider trading and other such practices and warns them multiple times not only when they're inducted into it but several times throughout their employment.