Oracle Corporation

Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977, naming it after a CIA database project he had worked on called Oracle. Ellison had dropped out of two universities — the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago — without completing a degree. He was 33 when he founded the company with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, investing $2,000 of his own money. His original goal was to build a relational database based on a paper published by IBM researcher Edgar Codd — a paper IBM itself had no plans to commercialise.

Oracle went public in 1986 and grew explosively through aggressive sales tactics. By 1990, Oracle was the second largest software company in the world after Microsoft. Then, in 1990, the company was forced to restate earnings after it emerged that sales staff had been booking revenue from contracts that customers had not yet signed. The stock fell 80%. Oracle nearly went bankrupt. Ellison later described this as the moment he learned that a company's culture reflects its leader.

Oracle launched a hostile takeover bid for rival PeopleSoft in June 2003 — a process that took 18 months and included PeopleSoft's CEO publicly calling Ellison a "sociopath." Oracle eventually acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion in January 2005. This began Oracle's acquisition strategy: buying enterprise software companies, cutting their workforces, and integrating them into Oracle's sales machine. The company acquired over 100 companies in the following decade.

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion, gaining ownership of Java — the programming language. Within months, Oracle sued Google for $9 billion, alleging that Android's use of Java APIs constituted copyright infringement. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Google's favour in 2021 after eleven years of litigation. It was one of the longest and most consequential copyright cases in technology history.

Oracle repositioned itself as an AI infrastructure company in 2023, signing major deals with Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI to provide GPU cloud capacity. The company's stock tripled in two years as investors revalued Oracle as an AI play rather than a legacy database company. Ellison, then 79, personally negotiated many of the key partnerships — including a reported conversation with Elon Musk about Grok's infrastructure needs.