LARRY ELLISON'S YEAR OF WINNING

Sorry, Elon! It's Larry's year. From going after huge deals (TikTok, Paramount) and pivoting Oracle to Al, Ellison is richer and more relevant than ever. But in clawing back to the top, he's taking on more risk and setting sky-high expectations.

- by BETHANY MCLEAN illustration by ANDREA VENTURA

On September 25, President Trump signed an executive order titled "Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security." Trump announced that a majority stake of Tik Tok's U.S. operations-80 percent-would go to "American investors, American companies, great ones," a.k.a. a group of Trump loyalists, including Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell, as well as Larry Ellison's Oracle and an Abu Dhabi investment firm called MGX. Vice President Vance, who said the deal valued Tik Tok's U.S. operations at $14 billion, called it a "good deal for investors." That's something of an understatement given analysts put the value at $30 billion to $35 billion-or at least double what the investors are reportedly paying.

The Tik Tok deal could be the coup of the century. But for one of the investors, Larry Ellison, grabbing a piece of the social platform is just one small part of his remarkable, mind-blowing 2025, a year that saw Oracle, a fusty database and cloud-computing company, emerge improbably as one of the hottest AI stocks.

Just two weeks before the TikTok announcement, Oracle revealed that it had $455 billion in backlogged orders, which includes providing infrastructure that AI companies require for their computing.

The company said this business would grow from a projected $18 billion this fiscal year to $144 billion in fiscal 2030. Analysts were dumbstruck. One said he was "in shock"; another said he was "blown away."

The news sent Oracle's market value up $244 billion, while Ellison's own net worth jumped over $200 billion from the beginning of the year to a peak of close to $400 billion in mid-September.

It's all the more remarkable given that Oracle is almost 50 years old. The company made the Inc. 500 list, the precursor to the Inc. 5000, three times in the 1980s.