Larry Ellison: Serial Dropout Who Made an ‘Incredible Business Mistake’ Now Promotes AI Surveillance System
Larry Ellison recently discussed AI surveillance. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.
Key Takeaways
- During Oracle’s 2024 financial analyst meeting, co-founder Larry Ellison discussed the topic of AI surveillance.
- Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 and steered the company through a major crisis in the early 90s.
- At the time, he called accounting practices used by Oracle salespeople an “incredible business mistake.”
In the 45 years since he co-founded Oracle, Larry Ellison has witnessed multiple seismic shifts in the global software market and survived an accounting controversy that nearly crippled the company.
Ellison’s journey from college dropout to the second-richest man in the world mirrors the turbulent ascent of the software industry itself. As AI transforms the entire sector yet again, the Oracle Chairman is ready to adapt once more.
Larry Ellison on AI
During a question and answer session at Oracle’s 2024 financial analyst meeting, Ellison fielded several questions on AI.
He argued that the firm is well-placed to benefit from rising AI investment and said Oracle’s infrastructure business and database services will continue to drive growth in the sector.
On the infrastructure side, he said that Oracle remains an important player in an increasingly dynamic cloud market and has forged new relationships with the major hyperscalars to offer Oracle services within other cloud environments.
Meanwhile, he said the firm’s core focus on databases will help ensure its ongoing relevance in an increasingly AI-centric software market. “Unless you have your data properly organized, you can’t use AI,” he observed. “In the AI world where data is an essential enabler, we have the best database […] that’s an important pillar of our future.”
Moving on to a discussion of the AI application layer, Ellison predicted that Oracle will continue to grow its business there too.
AI Surveillance
In comments that have made headlines for their potentially dystopian implications, Ellison described how AI is being integrated into new surveillance systems such as Oracle’s police body cameras .
“The police will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording everything that’s going on,” he claimed.
“Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person.” Meanwhile, “citizens will [also] be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Alongside police body cameras, Ellison suggested AI could be used to “lock down schools” thanks to AI cameras that immediately sound the alarm the moment someone pulls out a gun.
Who is Larry Ellison?
Before he was the Chairman of Oracle and the second-richest man in the world, Ellison started his career designing software for Ampex and Amdahl Corporation.
While he is certainly a gifted programmer, Ellison also sits in a tradition of American tech entrepreneurs who never graduated from college.
Having dropped out of a pre-med course at the University of Illinois, he was exposed to computers at the University of Chicago, where he studied physics and mathematics for just one term before leaving to pursue work in California.
Ellison founded the company that would become Oracle in 1977. Originally named Software Development Laboratories, the firm rebranded to reflect the name of its flagship product—a database management system inspired by the company’s work for the CIA.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, Oracle expanded globally and cemented its position as the preeminent provider of database software to businesses. However, the company’s sales practices during the period nearly resulted in its bankruptcy.
Oracle’s Brush With Disaster
At the heart of Oracle’s crisis sat dubious accounting practices used by sales representatives that overstated the company’s earnings.
Because they were paid bonuses based on the software they sold, Oracle’s salespeople used to book the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This created a major problem for the company when those future sales failed to materialize, leading to a cascade of accounting errors.
The problem reached its apex in 1991 when investors sued Oracle for overstating its earnings and booked $12.4 million in losses.
Former CEO Ellison responded by firing Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Walker and pursuing reforms to fix what he called “an incredible business mistake.”
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