On September 10, 2025, Larry Ellison became the richest person in the world, if only for a brief period. His wealth surged after Oracle, the business software company he founded in 1977, reported strong quarterly results that exceeded expectations. Oracle’s shares increased by more than 36% on that day, a spike that saw Ellison’s fortune swell by US$101B. It was, at the time, the largest single-day increase ever recorded.
In case you’re interested what the adoption of data bases looked like for the customers on the ground, the book In the age of the smart machine by Zuboff, there’s many accounts about this. Though she discussed other changes as well.
Oracle databases are still used widely today. As Ellison reminds us so proudly:
‘The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything. The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database.’
A triumph, if there ever was one.
is a bit weak, first that quote is obviously very old, and predates Amazon ripping out the Oracle database. But the other thing is that Oracle now is now a database company, they very successfully expanded vertically into applications, which might deserve a story in itself. Then there is their newer pivot to cloud and then AI, which is still in progress, but is what made Larry rich at the beginning of the article, briefly.
‘The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything. The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database.’
A triumph, if there ever was one.
Ironically, 2014 is the year that Amazon started a five year effort to rip Oracle out.
A triumph of switching costs, if there ever was one.
