It was just after 9pm on Thursday, September 18th, 2003 when the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco was bombed from above. The fusillade came with no advanced warning and had no historical precedent. My first thought was terror attack. My second thought was earthquake.
My third thought, the one that turned out to be correct, was that Larry freaking Ellison was up to something weird. Sure enough Ellison had hired a personal firework designer, bribed the right officials and gotten permission to park a barge in the Marina District of San Francisco. The show that resulted lasted for 30 full minutes and was close enough to the city that burned out husks of explosives landed on some houses.
It was also beautiful. Even my 10 month old daughter eventually stopped crying and just stared at the pretty lights that were almost certainly going to kill us all. The next day it was revealed that the display was a celebration of Ellison’s participation in the Moet Cup sailing race. Larry didn’t ask for permission or apologize. He just did.
Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO of Oracle (ORCL) yesterday. He started the company from nothing in 1977 and built it into one of the largest software companies in the world, accumulating a net worth of somewhere around $50 billion along the way. Ellison isn’t particularly well-known, but make no mistake about his place in the Pantheon of Silicon Valley. While Steve Jobs and Bill Gates got most of the attention Ellison had by far the most fun.
This was a guy who piloted jets, won America’s Cup, dated the most beautiful women on earth and ran Oracle all at the same time. In the 90s the rule of thumb on Wall Street was to sell Oracle shares when Larry announced a new passion and buy the stock in size when he came back to the office. Ellison may not have invented the idea of "Tech Titan with a God Complex," but he certainly perfected it.
Ellison is perhaps the world's first trash talking corporate Samurai. In Ellison's prime he was slathered in that special mix of genius and ego that made disasters slide off him without a trace.
He very much walked the walk when it came to running Oracle. In 2010 HP CEO Mark Hurd was fired for allegedly falsifying expense accounts to cover up an attempted affair. Ellison wrote an email to the New York Times calling HP's move “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on Apple’s board fired Steve Jobs.” Ellison got Hurd to forego more than $30 million in severance from HP and come to work for Oracle. Critics scoffed but Hurd will be one of the two people replacing Ellison as CEO at Oracle. The other is Safra Catz, a long time Oracle insider and one of the most powerful women in business.
It’s fitting that Ellison is stepping down the day Alibaba (BABA) goes public. It’s a perfect symbolic transition of power from West to the far East that we’ve been bracing for for years. Larry and his God complex won’t disappear. They’ll just loom over everything like a smugger version of Obi Won Kanobi.
Just remember that without Larry Ellison there would be no Jack Ma. The PayPal Mafia wouldn’t know how to swagger. The world would be a smaller, more equitable, nicer but much less interesting place.
More from Investing:
Paralyzed Marine walks thanks to ReWalk technology
Pier 1 punished, Vivus lifting off, Amazon unveils new Kindles