Larry's Laboratory

The fifth-richest person in the world has been quietly turning an entire Hawaiian island into a wellness experiment. Now Oracle founder Larry Ellison has been drafted into the fight against the coronavirus, a critical test of whether data can indeed save us

- ANGEL AU-YEUNG

As Larry Ellison sits in one of several idyllic bubbles he has created for himself, a lush 249-acre estate in Rancho Mirage, California, the playground of the powerful near Palm Springs, the world begins to fall apart. It’s Black Thursday, March 12: The US stock market has suffered its greatest single-day percentage fall since the 1987 crash, President Trump ordered a ban on visitors traveling from Europe, the NBA’s season was suspended, Disney decided to close its theme parks and America’s dad, Tom Hanks, announced that he had the coronavirus, the scourge causing all these things.

And no, not even a desert oasis can offer protection from the deluge. The founder of Oracle has already seen his company’s stock drop 11 percent this day, and now torrents of rain pour down as if on cue. “Last week?” says Ellison, 75, who has been preparing to host 450,000 tennis fans for a tournament that will no longer be. “That was a year ago.”

Ellison has built a $59 billion fortune, the world’s fifth-largest, by harnessing data. No surprise that he’s already taken preemptive virus measures. Staffers greet guests at his estate with a no-contact thermometer just outside the gates. Those deemed sufficiently temperate pass by bottles of Purell, already a scarce commodity, neatly arranged on a coffee table. Cleaners are everywhere; as we talk in the estate’s tennis pavilion, with both clay and hard court surfaces, adjacent to his personal 18-hole golf course, workers in waterproof black attire intermittently squeegee the windowpanes.