Owning Everything

Here is no.1 of this year's America’s Ten Greediest: The 2014 Edition

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1/ Larry Ellison: Owning Everything

Year in and year out, Larry Ellison pulls down more compensation than any other corporate CEO in the United States. He topped the list for 2013 with $78.4 million. He’ll likely top the list for 2014 as well. He grabbed $67.3 million for the year, his Oracle software company announced in September.
Ellison will definitely not top the CEO pay list next year. The reason: In September, Ellison stepped down as Oracle’s chief exec, a slot he has filled since he started the company over three dozen years ago. But Ellison hasn’t quite retired yet. He’s now serving as Oracle’s “chief technology officer.”
Ellison also still holds about a quarter of Oracle’s shares, a stash that brings his net worth to $50.6 billion, enough to make him the world’s fifth-richest person.

In residences owned, Ellison may well rank as the world’s numero uno. This past March, a business publication took a shot at cataloging the homes and other properties Ellison has collected over the years. He has, notes Business Insider, “all but taken over entire neighborhoods in Malibu and the Lake Tahoe area.”
Ellison’s big-time collecting started back in 1988 when he picked up a $3.9-million home in San Francisco. He would later spend nine years recasting a 23-acre estate further down the San Francisco peninsula into a $70-million faux 16th-century Japanese emperor’s palace.
Ellison owns a real-life Japanese palace, too, a historic $86-million garden villa in Kyoto. And don’t forget his $10.5-million mansion in Rhode Island’s Newport or his $42.9-million golf estate in California’s Rancho Mirage. Or the $500 million he shelled out two years ago to buy 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

Ellison, to be sure, has interests that go beyond real estate. He likes yachts. He currently has two, each over half as long as a football field.
Ellison also likes to play basketball, even on his yachts. If a ball bounces over the railing, no problem. Ellison has a hired hand in a powerboat following his yacht, reports noted this past spring, “to retrieve balls that go overboard.”


Roll on socialism, a system of equal access and no individual private ownership of the common wealth.