How would you notice? There's nothing you can buy with 65B you can't by with 60B or even 50B. Only the distance to Buffet and others is different.

You would notice by looking at your account balance.

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.

Well that doesn't match how wealth on the level we are talking about works.

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.

4 billion dollars of 65 billion dollars is around ~6%. Now I'm not a stock guru but I'm betting for a fairly diversified portfolio a change of 6% is actually pretty big, and is something that is likely to happen over a fairly long period of time. As an arbitrary pick, it looks like the S&P 500 has moved +4.59% in the past 6 months.

>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 is true that such an acquisition or loss of fortune would be noticed. But context of the discussion is "how much did he overpay the acquisition to put money in his pocket" So question is "Is it a difference he notices, if Oracle spent less on the acquisition?" - So if Oracle paid not 9.3, but 5B for PeopleSoft Larry got not 4, but a bit less of 2B for the deal for his account. At the same time the value of his Oracle stocks would be different (probably higher) thus the notable effect of the deal is small for Larry (but potentially bad for that sueing pension fund)

There's no much difference in lifestyle between making $100,000 a year and $110,000, but I'd sure know the difference if I lost $10,000. Either way though, at that level it's not really about the money itself.

the $4B was in cash - the 65B is in Oracle stock. he can't divest the later without having an impact on it's value

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