Larry Ellison’s Plan to Use AI to Cure Cancer
The long-time head of Oracle is applying both his own vast fortune and his company's capacity to making fast progress in medicine and biotech using artificial intelligence and health data collection.
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As of August 2025, the second-wealthiest person in the world is Larry Ellison, the cofounder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer of the U.S. software corporation Oracle, who has a net worth estimated at around $295 billion.1 Ellison, who is currently 81 years old, served as Oracle’s CEO until 2014, actively running and shaping Oracle’s organizational development, after which time he stepped into his current roles of CTO and chairman.2 Oracle achieved global prominence after releasing the first commercial relational database in 1979. By the 1990s, much of big business and many large bureaucracies ran on Oracle’s software, and today Oracle is one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a market capitalization of nearly $700 billion (ORCL).3 Ellison retains approximately 40% of Oracle’s stock, his most effective projects route through Oracle, and he is a key player in the race to build data centers of unprecedented size for artificial intelligence applications, such as the $500 billion Stargate project with OpenAI, Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank, and the United Arab Emirates.4