> not easy making ends meet...

ain't that the truth. I was having lunch overlooking SF Bay last year, and this *very* nice yacht cruised past. Half the folks in the restaurant were looking and asking the waiters "who owns that?".

Yes, you guessed it. Larry on his way for a little afternoon outing. $20m will probably barely cover his increased lunch and fuel charges.

No, I'm not jealous or anything...

Does this have anything to do with the new Google pipes in SE Asia?

Is this going to be the decade the super villan was born... cue Dr Evil laugh!

Larry's racing yacht was recently mounted on Oracle's pond. Now Larry's attention is grabbing money, not crushing and destroying competitors. It all sounds to me like retirement is nearing.

or the business goes under - quite likely.

No surprise you are paying over the odds, for something to store your business critical data in.

Oracle has so many businesses by the proverbial gonads.

And the database just isn't that good.

>>>And the database just isn't that good.

No, it really isn't. You have to do so much work to it (in painfully non-intuitive interfaces) to even get it to a usable place, it's just not worth the effort. For all but the most demanding of massive enterprises, SQL Server works just bloody lovely.

But then it becomes power. And if someone has billions, you need MORE billions to make sure YOU conduct the orchestra, not them.

Pretty sick, to my mind.

Happy to stand in for ya if you want to go on that year long holiday Larry

@Les Matthew - class

40 foot high solid gold Buddhas arranged around the east-bay I am looking for financing sounds like I found my man.

think about it.

They have a license to print money, they want something nice and shiny they just print money to get it.

Normally they just give governments money as loans, increase the overall amount of money in circulation, reducing the value of the money, and they move in ahead of time and pick up the real value.

We need to go back to a gold, silver, jewel economy, the way the system is set up we are just working for counterfeiters, that is the dirty little secret of money.

It would be amusing to see ole' Larry with his pile of worthless money, so he better spend it quick - there you go, that is how you do the Keynesian trickle down multiplier :)

Customer of mine was asked if he liked Oracle. Answer was "No, not really, but the CEO says we can't switch because he doesn't want Larry mad at him."

Now that's power..

God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

Well, if you'd had your money in US$ two years ago, you've also taken it in the shorts.

And even though there have been some HUGE crashes on the stock exchange, 11% over inflation is the average increase in value in stock.

This does not sound to me like a dangerous investment.

Quite - almost all of his worth is tied up as Oracle stock. If he sold it all at once, its value would drop to zero. To quote Bart Simpson, "What's a billion times zero? And don't say zero!" Even when he dumps off a million shares here and there, to pay for his latest koi-carp lake or whatever, it has a noticeable downward effect on the stock price.

Also, much of his "pay" or as American's call it "compensation", is likely not in pure cold cash, but in options or perhaps full stock. Therefore when his pay rises to $72m, that probably means he's been awarded x million extra shares a year.

All this talk about Larry's wealth being tied up in shares is utter rubbish.

There are 5 billion shares in Oracle.

Larry sold 1 million a day for 10 days in February, representing 0.2 of a percent of the shares, and earned himself about $22m (tax free) per transaction - or $220m in cash for the month. It had no noticeable effect on the share price. He did the same in January and December 07, November '07 and so on. So in 5 months he has turned 50 million shares into $ 1bn + in cash and traded about 1 percent of the company.

Yes he has a lot of shares but he has a lot of cash also.