Larry Ellison retires: Oracle founder could’ve been Bill Gates

LARRY Ellison, whose career has been marked by his bitter rivalry with Bill Gates, is stepping down from the company he founded with a wealth of $57.11 billion.

MANY people in Australia may not have heard of Larry Ellison, but he’s the man who could have been Bill Gates.

The polarising Ellison co-founded software giant Oracle mere months after Gates registered Microsoft with the US Patent Office. He also has a legendary rivalry with Gates, two technology titans who were pioneers in their industry.

He has relentlessly gone after Microsoft, even famously hiring private investigators to sift through Microsoft’s garbage. An attempt to disrupt Microsoft’s business with the release of the Network Computer — a simple web-surfing computer — failed.

Oracle also debuted on the stock market in the mid-1980s — one day before Microsoft, but at half the valuation of its competitor.

But after 37 years the helm, Ellison is stepping aside as CEO of the business software maker, ending a colourful era marked by his flamboyant behaviour and outlandish wealth amassed while building one of the world’s best-known technology companies.

While he may never have beaten Gates at the game, he is the world’s fifth richest man, according to Forbes, with a $57.11 billion ($US51.3 billion) fortune.

So much of Larry Ellison’s career was marked by his rivalry with Bill Gates.

Since he co-founded Oracle with $US1200 of his own money in 1977, Ellison has become has well known for his antics away from the office as his accomplishments as the company’s CEO.

Through the years, Ellison has driven fancy cars, flown his own jet, raced yachts, wooed beautiful women and owned ornate homes in San Francisco, Malibu and an exclusive Silicon Valley neighbourhood, where he spent $170 million on a 45-acre compound designed to remind him of Japan and the samurai warriors that he admires. In 2012, he bought his own Hawaiian island by acquiring 98 per cent of Lanai.

Last year, Ellison staged the boating race for America’s Cup in the San Francisco Bay, where a team of professional sailors that he personally financed won the trophy for the second straight time.

Ellison, a close friend of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, has always relished his status as the richest person in the nation’s hi-tech heartland, where free-flowing stock options sometimes turned receptionists and cafeteria workers into millionaires. Money is “a method of keeping score,” Ellison once told an interviewer.

Larry Ellison’s wealth has allowed daughter Megan Ellison (right) to become a successful Hollywood producer of flicks including Zero Dark Thirty.

With the changing of the guard announced Thursday, Ellison will be handing over his job to his two top lieutenants, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, who become co-CEOs.

Ellison, 70, intends to still play an influential role at Oracle Corp. He is taking over as Oracle’s executive chairman, replacing Jeff Henley in the position, and will oversee the engineering departments as chief technology officer. What’s more, Ellison remains Oracle’s biggest shareholder with a 25 per cent stake in the Redwood Shores, California, company that accounts for most of his $51 billion fortune.

Catz, Oracle’s chief financial officer until Thursday, will be responsible for manufacturing, legal and finance, while Hurd will supervise sales and all services. Both of them will report to Oracle’s board instead of Ellison. Oracle isn’t hiring a CFO to replace Catz.

“I am going to continue to do what I have been doing the past several years and they are going to continue doing what they have been doing the past several years,” Ellison told analysts during a Thursday conference call.

Given that Catz and Hurd are already handling many of the same duties as Oracle’s co-presidents, the new pecking order may not seem like much of a change, especially among investors who worried about the company’s sluggish growth in recent years.

Larry Ellison hoists the America’s Cup trophy after the team he financed won the race.

Oracle’s stock slipped 85 cents, or 2 per cent, to $40.70 in Thursday’s extended trading following the company’s announcement. The downturn may have had more to do with Wall Street’s disappointment with Oracle’s fiscal first-quarter earnings, which were also announced late Thursday and missed analyst targets, than with the reshuffling of management duties.

The shake-up comes at a critical point in Oracle’s history. It is trying to adapt to the technological upheaval that is causing more of its corporate customers to lease software applications stored in remote data centres instead of paying licensing fees to install programs on machines kept in their own offices. The shift to internet-connected software has become known as “cloud computing.”

“While there was some speculation Larry could step down, the timing is a bit of a head scratcher in our opinion and Wall Street will have many questions,” said FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives.

Originally published as Larry Ellison retires: Oracle founder could’ve been Bill Gates