Larry Ellison is a very interesting business leader. From reading accounts looks like he is a very dynamic business leader inside of Oracle. Certainly there are both positive and negative interactions. But he was also supportive of some of his top people leaving to start their own companies that have gone on to do really well. Often times he would invest into their businesses and personally capture upside.

On a long enough time line many of those businesses also went on to become direct competitors. So not surprised to see that he has a stake in the business, though have 45% is pretty amazing.

Can you name his competitors?

I can only recall Salesforce, although I don't know the extent to which their offerings overlap.

For the record, Salesforce was founded with Larry's money by Larry's employees -- pretty much like NetSuite, in fact.

SAP and Microsoft Dynamics are the biggest, IIRC.

I guess that's why the saying goes "you need money to make money" and similar ones like "money attracts money".

It seems that at some point after becoming very wealthy your money can produce more money than you can actually spend.

And yea, I agree that being able to make that amount of money in a "single operation" is staggering.

Just the interest/return on investment of that amount in one year would make anyone a millionaire.

But he still had to buy/acquire that 45% of stock. That proportion didn't just land in his pocket. Of course it's appreciated over time.