In September, Larry Ellison‘s Oracle said it had accumulated $455 billion in backlogged orders, including the infrastructure that allows AI companies to perform computing.
The company is expected to grow from $18 billion this fiscal year to $144 billion in fiscal 2030.
The news was surprising, to say the least. One analyst was “in shock,” he told Inc. reporter Bethany McLean for a feature on the Ellison. Another said he was “blown away.”
The growth even briefly made Ellison the wealthiest person in the world, surpassing Elon Musk.
And it was a competition. Ellison has said before that he’s “addicted to winning,” and he’s the subject of a 2003 biography, “Everyone Else Must Fail.”
Bryan Cantrill, an engineer who worked at Oracle, labeled Ellison a “lawnmower… [and] don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower,” he said. Longtime investor Roger McNamee spoke to his fierceness, too.
“He was the first CEO I ever met who felt it was important to punish those who competed with him,” he said. “He views business as a battlefield.”
Oracle made its move into the AI space in November 2023. From that point until January 2025, the company was the largest lessor of data center capacity in the U.S., according to SemiAnalysis. OpenAI began renting servers from its giant Texas-based data center in 2025, making Oracle’s publicly traded shares a sort of stand-in for the privately held OpenAI.
Safra Catz, former CEO and executive vice chair or Oracle’s board, said the company is now the “go-to place for AI workloads.” She highlighted the hefty contracts it holds with the “who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and many others.”
Catz predicts that Oracle’s revenue could jump to $144 billion in 2030, nearly doubling the $53 billion it made last year.
Oracle’s been in the scene for nearly 50 years. The company clinched a spot on the Inc. 500 list, which came before the Inc. 5000, three times in the 1980s.
“Oracle has prospered through market changes that should have killed it,” said McNamee. “The companies that competed with Oracle in the 1980s and 1990s are all gone now.”
Incredibly, the company has outlasted countless companies and emerged again as a leader in new technology. But the drive behind Ellison’s big moves and success is clear.
“Am I winning for Oracle shareholders, or is this simply a matter of personal vanity?” Ellison said in a CBS 60 Minutes episode. “An awful lot of it is personal vanity.”
Read the full story, “Larry Ellison and Oracle Won 2025 — but at What Cost?”
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Ava Levinson
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