Larry Ellison's Latest Wife and the Billionaire's Unfinished Journey

In September 2025, when 81-year-old Larry Ellison officially topped the world’s richest list with a fortune reaching $393 billion, it wasn’t just a financial milestone—it was a vindication of a life lived by his own unconventional rules. His latest marriage to Jolin Zhu, a woman 47 years his junior, once again thrust his personal life into the spotlight. Yet this marriage, like his business empire, tells a larger story about ambition, reinvention, and the price of staying hungry at an age when most people retreat from the world.

From Orphaned Student to Silicon Valley Pioneer

Larry Ellison’s journey to billionaire status didn’t follow the traditional script. Born in 1944 in the Bronx to an unwed teenage mother, he was adopted at nine months old by a modest Chicago family struggling with finances. By his own admission, this early instability would shape everything that followed—a restlessness, a refusal to accept limitations, a constant need to move forward.

His college years were marked by false starts. He enrolled at the University of Illinois but dropped out in his sophomore year after his adoptive mother died. He tried again at the University of Chicago, lasting just one semester before abandoning academia altogether. Rather than seeing himself as a failure, Ellison viewed these departures as liberation. He spent years drifting across America, taking freelance programming gigs wherever he found them, until he landed in Berkeley, California—a place that felt alive with possibility.

It was at Ampex Corporation in the early 1970s where Ellison’s true calling emerged. As a programmer, he worked on a groundbreaking project: designing a database system for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. That project, codenamed “Oracle,” planted the seed for what would become his life’s work. Recognizing the commercial potential where others saw only institutional technology, Ellison made his move. In 1977, at age 32, he co-founded Software Development Laboratories with colleagues Bob Miner and Ed Oates, investing just $2,000 of his own capital—$1,200 of it coming from his own pocket.

The renamed Oracle Corporation went public on NASDAQ in 1986, transforming Ellison from a wanderer into an empire builder. What distinguished him wasn’t inventing database technology but being among the first to understand its market value and having the audacity to bet everything on that vision. For decades, he remained at Oracle’s helm in various capacities—president from 1978 to 1996, chairman starting in 1990—navigating the company through boom cycles and crises alike. A 1992 surfing accident nearly claimed his life, yet even that brush with mortality couldn’t diminish his appetite for risk.

Oracle’s Unlikely Comeback in the AI Era

By the early 2020s, Oracle faced an uncomfortable reality: it had become yesterday’s technology giant. Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure had dominated cloud computing while Oracle seemed stuck in the enterprise software past. The company’s relevance was in genuine question.

Then came the generative AI explosion of 2024-2025. Suddenly, the infrastructure that trains and deploys massive AI models became the hottest commodity in tech. Oracle possessed something critical: data center expertise, database optimization capabilities, and relationships with enterprise clients hungry for AI solutions. On September 10, 2025, Oracle announced the signing of contracts worth hundreds of billions, including a landmark $300 billion, five-year partnership with OpenAI to provide AI infrastructure.

The market’s response was immediate and dramatic. Oracle’s stock surged over 40% in a single day—the largest jump since 1992. Ellison’s net worth jumped by more than $100 billion overnight. He overtook Elon Musk to claim the world’s richest person title, his fortune reaching $393 billion. Industry analysts rebranded Oracle’s transformation: from “aging software vendor” to “AI infrastructure dark horse.” At 81 years old, Ellison had orchestrated one of tech’s most unlikely comebacks.

This wasn’t accidental. Throughout 2025, while laying off thousands of workers in legacy hardware and software divisions, Oracle simultaneously invested aggressively in data center capacity and AI-focused infrastructure. Ellison recognized the inflection point and positioned his company to capture it. It was vintage Ellison: aggressive repositioning, willingness to cannibalize the old to build the new, and impeccable timing.

Building a Family Empire: The Ellison Dynasty in Tech and Media

Ellison’s wealth hasn’t remained confined to his personal empire. His son, David Ellison, made headlines in 2024 by acquiring Paramount Global (which includes CBS and MTV) for $8 billion, with $6 billion of that support flowing from the family’s resources. This acquisition marked a strategic expansion: the father controlled Silicon Valley’s database infrastructure, while the son now controlled Hollywood’s content distribution. Together, they were building a cross-media technology empire.

The family’s influence extends beyond business into politics. Ellison has been a consistent Republican donor, funding Marco Rubio’s 2015 presidential campaign and contributing $15 million to Senator Tim Scott’s super PAC in 2022. In January 2025, he appeared at the White House alongside SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion AI data center network initiative. The symbolism was clear: Ellison wasn’t just a businessman but a power broker shaping the nation’s technological future.

Multiple Marriages, Endless Pursuits: The Personal Side of Larry Ellison

The public discovered Ellison’s most recent marriage only through academic records. In 2024, University of Michigan donation documentation revealed that Larry Ellison had married Jolin Zhu, a Chinese-American woman born in Shenyang and 47 years his junior. This fifth marriage surprised few who knew his history—four previous marriages had produced limited lasting partnerships but considerable tabloid interest.

Yet Ellison’s romantic history reveals something more than mere indulgence. His partners, like his business ventures, tend toward the unconventional. He doesn’t follow society’s rules about age-appropriate relationships any more than he followed the rules about college degrees or corporate hierarchy.

Beyond marriage, Ellison’s personal life reflects a man determined to live without compromise. He owns 98% of Lanai Island in Hawaii and maintains multiple California mansions. He’s obsessed with water and wind sports with an intensity that borders on compulsive. In 2013, the Oracle Team USA sailing team he backed staged one of sailing’s most dramatic comebacks to win the America’s Cup. In 2018, he founded SailGP, a high-speed catamaran racing league that has attracted celebrity investors including actress Anne Hathaway and soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé.

Tennis represents another passion. He invested in revitalizing California’s Indian Wells tournament, transforming it into what’s now called the “fifth Grand Slam.” These aren’t mere hobbies for Ellison—they’re expressions of a philosophy about aging. When a startup executive mentioned in a 2018 Quora discussion that Ellison exercised for hours daily throughout the 1990s and 2000s, consuming only water and green tea while rigorously controlling his diet, the subtext became clear: discipline, not privilege, explained his vitality.

At 81, Ellison appears two decades younger than his peers. People attribute this to genetics or wealth, but Ellison himself would credit his refusal to accept the conventional limitations of aging. Marriage to someone 47 years younger wasn’t about defying nature—it was simply another expression of his life philosophy: wanting what he wanted without apology.

Legacy and Vision: Where Does the Wealth Go?

In 2010, Ellison joined the ranks of the world’s mega-philanthropists by signing the “Giving Pledge,” committing to donate at least 95% of his fortune to charitable causes. Yet his approach to philanthropy distinguishes him from peers like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. While they collaborate on collective initiatives and public advocacy, Ellison prefers solitude. As The New York Times reported, he “values his privacy and resists external influence.”

His charitable giving reflects deeply personal priorities. In 2016, he donated $200 million to the University of Southern California to establish a cancer research center. More recently, he announced funding for the Ellison Institute of Technology, established jointly with the University of Oxford, to tackle medical innovation, agricultural efficiency, and climate solutions. His declaration was characteristically ambitious: “We aim to design the next generation of life-saving drugs, build low-cost agricultural systems, and develop efficient clean energy.”

This reflects Ellison’s ultimate philosophy: wealth exists as a means to pursue one’s vision without compromise. He won’t be remembered as a team player or consensus builder. He’ll be remembered as a man who refused to accept the world as it was given to him—neither the poverty of his childhood, nor the limitations of his education, nor the constraints of age, nor even the boundaries society places on how a billionaire should behave in matters of marriage and partnership.

At 81, after five marriages and fifty years in business, Larry Ellison remains exactly what he’s always been: a restless, uncompromising force of will, now with the resources to fully express that nature without apology.