Larry Ellison

It’s been a decade since Larry Ellison stepped down from his CEO post at Oracle and almost half a century since he cofounded the software giant. But the 80-year-old billionaire still looms large over Silicon Valley, even if it is from his private island in Hawaii. He’s still chief technology officer and executive chairman at Oracle, and the database and cloud company saw strong annual earnings this past year boosted by demand for generative AI—adding another $14 billion to Ellison’s $200-billion-plus net worth. Ellison now has a toehold in Hollywood, too, with his son, David Ellison, taking over as Paramount CEO through an $8 billion merger. The elder Ellison helped fund the deal, but Paramount recently clarified that David will have voting control.