Larry Ellison's Most Badass Moments

Date: Unknown

According to the book The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder had a company executive plant a sign at competitor RTI's headquarters that read "For Sale By Owner: Call 1-800-4INGRES" and take a photo, which he showed to his sales force during a rally in Hawaii. Why exactly? To encourage the team that he, nor they, should take any prisoners: “We’re going to run them out of business and buy that building, which we’re going to bulldoze. After that, we’ll salt the earth. Then we’ll go after their families.” Guess a pictures does speak a thousand words.

Date: Jun 27, 2000 

Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were never fond of each other. Tensions became so bad between the two that when Microsoft went under investigation for antitrust violations, Ellison called in private investigators to rummage through the trash cans of a research group suspected to be working for the PC giant. "It's absolutely true we set out to expose Microsoft's covert activities…I feel very good about what we did … Maybe our investigation organization may have done things unsavory, but it's not illegal. We got the truth out," said Ellison. 

Date: 2004

As if dropping $180 million on 12 properties in Malibu and $65 million on five contigious lots in Carbon Beach weren't enough. Ya boy splurged even more by spending a cool million on an entertianment system consisting of a "rock-concert sized video projector at one end of a drained swimming pool, using the gaping hole as a giant subwoofer." Why wasn't this guy ever featured on MTV Cribs? Ballin'!

Date: 2005 

If you stood close to his circle or made incredible strides at the company, chances are Ellison blessed you one of these: an Acura NSX. Ellison became infamous for gifting the sports car every year during its production run. Judging from his recent collection of stunners, which includes an Audi R8, MacLaren F1, and Lexus LFA, the man knows a thing or two about exotic whips.

Date: May 7, 2010 

The resemblances are nearly uncanny between Ellison and Robert Downey Jr.’s version of Tony Stark. Self-made, egomaniacal billionaries who've dominated the tech sector: they're practically dopplegangers minus the superhero suit. Iron Man 2 producers came up with the dope idea of having the Oracle kingpin make a special appearance in the sequel, greeting Stark on a stairway and requesting the Avenger give him a call. Gets no cooler than a Marvel cameo.

Date: Nov. 3, 2010 

After suing SAP for illegally downloading Oracle software, allegedly that is, Ellison threatened to subpoena former CEO Leo Apotheker. Only there were two problems: He was the Chairman of HP at the time and out of the country supposedly on business. Oracle made the attempt, but HP declined it, leading Ellison to air everyone out in the process: “The HP board sent him to Bolivia to talk to customers. Then they sent him to Mongolia to talk to customers, just out of reach of the federal subpoenas ... the board figured out [later]: we should have left Leo in Mongolia." That pretty much damaged HP and SAP's credibility during the legal bout.

Date:  March 21, 2012 

Unfazed by SAP’s recently announced in-memory database called HANA, Ellison took shots at the competition suggesting it was high on something to consider itself a real threat to Oracle. In his own words: "When SAP, and, specifically Hasso Plattner, said they're going to build this in-memory database and compete with Oracle, I said. God, get me the name of that pharmacist, they must be on drugs.” You can't write this stuff.

Date: Dec. 3, 2010 

Upon reclaiming the highest land speed record in database computing from IBM, dude chose the perfect time to bash HP and its hardware. During a Webcast presentation at Oracle's headquarters, Ellison stated the following: “We think the HP machines are vulnerable and they’re slow and they’re expensive, and we’re going to go after them in the marketplace and we’re going to win market share.” Larry wasn't too far off on his prediction considering the PC maker's market value has continuously dropped over the past two years.

Date: Jun 13, 2013 

Nearly 98 percent of the sixth-largest Hawaiian island belongs to the third richest American. While it was unknown what the billionaire’s plans were for the property, Ellison told CNBC he planned on transforming the island of Lanai into an experiment that would utilize modern eco-frinedly technology for electric cars, organic farming, and solar power. Previous owner Rupert Murdoch wanted $1 billion for the land, but Ellison G'd him up for the asking price of $500 million.

Date: Aug. 13, 2013

It takes balls to call out the two biggest tech companies in the world. Ellison was more than happy to fill the void, practically voicing what every tech mogul was afraid to say and every electronics consumer was afraid to hear—Apple's days are numbered. During an interview with CBS’ Charlie Rose, he referenced long-time friend Steve Jobs significance to the company when the visionary was present and absent, twice. Then he slammed Google for stealing Oracle’s code and referred to CEO Larry Page as a person responsible for “evil” actions: “When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything. And at the very end you push a button and say, ‘Convert this to Android format…It makes what he did evil, which is quite different.” Shots fired!