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Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the world’s second richest man with a net worth of over $351 billion, has pledged to donate a whopping 95 percent of his wealth to charity. The 81-year-old tech billionaire who briefly overtook Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the global rich rich list, has a net worth of $351.6 billion, as of September 25, 2025, according to Forbes.
As per a report by Fortune, Larry Ellison is a part of The Giving Pledge, a global charitable campaign founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, his wife Melinda Gates, and media mogul Warren Buffet. Ellison, 81, became a part of the pledge in 2010, and will donate 95 percent of his total wealth (about $333 billion or Rs 2,959,921 crore) to philanthropic causes.
According to the report, a major part of Larry Ellison’s charitable donations are channeled via the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), a University of Oxford-based for-profit organization that focuses on global challenges including healthcare, food insecurity, climate change, and AI research.
Notably, Ellison has made several high-profile donations over the years, such as donating $200 million to establish a cancer research center at the University of Southern California, and a $1 billion donation to the Ellison Medical Foundation, which worked on disease prevention and aging before it was shut.
The Giving Pledge, a global charitable campaign founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, his wife Melinda Gates, and media mogul Warren Buffet, encourages the global rich to donate a major chunk of their fortune to charitable efforts. As of June 2022, the pledge had 236 signatories across 28 countries, including names like Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and India’s Azim Premji.
Larry Ellison, who became a signatory in 2010, has billions of dollars in commitments via the Giving Pledge and EIT, even though is charitable donations are lesser compared to some of his peers like Bill and Melinda Gates. The billionaire has stated that he will eventually donate nearly all of his fortune to philanthropic causes, but asserted that he will choose the terms and time of these contributions.
Born in 1944 in New York City, Larry Ellison contracted pneumonia when he was nine months old, and given up for adoption by his birth mother to his mother’s aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison. Larry’s foster parents raised him in Chicago, but he only learned that he was adopted at the age of 12, a discovery that would significantly shape his worldview.
In 1977, Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 as a database software company, and over the years, the firm has transformed into a global cloud computing powerhouse. The 81-year-old currently serves as the Chairman and CTO at Oracle Corporation, and owns 41 percent of the company’s shares.
Larry Ellison’s wealth has exponentially increased due to a recent surge in Oracle’s stock prices, including an astonishing $101 billion increase– the largest-ever recorded by Bloomberg– earlier this month, which had briefly catapulted him past Elon Musk as the world’s richest man. In June, Ellison’s wealth surged by a whopping $41 billion in just two days, including $25 billion in a single day, as per Bloomberg.
Interestingly, Larry Ellison is a close friend of Elon Musk, and a major investor in Tesla, having previously served on the company’s board December 2018 to August 2022. “I don’t know how many people know this… but I am a close friend of Elon Musk and a big investor in Tesla,” Ellison revealed in a 2018 interview. The Oracle boss has also come to Musk’s defense during several controversies involving the world’s richest man.
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