Despite fully recognizing the immutable truth that times waits for no one, I’m having a hard time accepting that the “Larry Ellison Story Hour” has apparently run it course after a 40-year string featuring 160 episodes that shaped how the world thinks about data, the cloud, AI, and innovation.
Yes, Oracle held an earnings call last week and cofounder and chairman Larry Ellison didn’t say a single word on the entire call. But then again, this silence was pre-ordained since Ellison decided to not even be on the call.
Over that 40-year span, Ellison used Oracle’s quarterly earnings calls to offer his views on:
- where the tech industry was headed and why that mattered;
- where the business world was headed and why;
- the essential need for relentless imagination, innovation, and risk-taking;
- the fundamental flaws of Oracle’s competitors, both real and imagined; and
- refusing to be defined or limited by others.
Now, I don’t mean to present all this as some unexpected shocker, particularly following the decision last year by former CEO Safra Catz to hand over that role to the company’s current CEOs, Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia. Since then, Catz has disappeared from all Oracle public appearances including earnings calls, and Ellison began to steadily and quite deliberately reduce his involvement and ceding center stage — and eventually the whole stage and the entire theater — to Magouyrk and Sicilia.
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Three months ago, in an analysis headlined “Larry Ellison Yields Spotlight to Oracle’s New CEOs,” I offered this list of Ellison’s achievements:
While I realize this is the way life works — nothing lasts forever — these early indications of Ellison’s willingness and perhaps even eagerness to step out of the Oracle spotlight he has dominated for the past half-century are momentous because Ellison and his achievements have made him one for the ages:
- the transformation of the database from a gritty and not-well-understood technology into one of the world’s most valuable and strategic assets;
- his early recognition that the database business and applications would be more valuable together than they are separately;
- his decision to leap into the hardware business when most other enterprise-tech companies were scrambling to abandon it;
- his foray into sailboat racing, where he transcended the caricature of a rich guy playing with expensive toys by not only winning the America’s Cup but also totally overhauling the sailing industry and how it engages with the world via his astute reliance on advanced technology;
- his absolutely audacious decision to begin competing directly against three of the world’s largest, most-powerful, and wealthiest corporations — Google, Amazon, and Microsoft — in the cloud-infrastructure market, and confounding cynics and supporters alike by then becoming enormously successful and forcing others to play catch-up;
- his stupendous achievement in getting those same three extraordinary competitors to turbocharge Oracle’s success by agreeing to sell the Oracle Database to their customers via *their* sales organizations;
- his vision to create massive “AI data centers” to power the AI Revolution; and
- Ellison’s ability to pursue — amid all of the wild stuff Oracle was pursuing — simultaneous adventures in professional tennis, restaurants, hotels, robotic farming, medical research, philanthropy, art, and more.
Final Thought
In LinkedIn over the past few days, I’ve been heartened to see numerous screenshots of Ellison appearing by video at Oracle FY27 sales-kickoff events, sharing his perspectives on what’s ahead for the company that in Q4 amassed the largest backlog in the history of business: $638 billion. And I suspect his ongoing involvement in product vision and strategy and deal-making continues to be a great benefit for and comfort to Magouyrk and Sicilia.
And I know that in two months, Ellison will celebrate his 82nd birthday. Nevertheless, I hope Ellison will continue to be actively and eagerly engaged in pushing the bounds of human imagination and achievement for a long time to come.
Because this industry is much, much better off for having Larry Ellison in it.
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