• Oracle CEO Mark Hurddied on October 18, 2019, at the age of 62.
• Earlier this year, he spoke about his leadership style and strategy at the tech company in an episode of Business Insider's podcast "This Is Success."
• Hurd joined as president in 2010 and soon began an overhaul of the company's sales team to prepare for an industrywide shift to cloud software. He said he faced a lot of pushback after making that call.
• The experience taught him that the most difficult leadership challenge is getting people to change for future trends and long-term value when they're already comfortable and things are going well.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd died on October 18, 2019, after taking a leave of absence for health reasons in September. Earlier this year, Business Insider had a chance to sit down with him for an episode of our podcast, "This Is Success." We used the opportunity to discuss his career, with a focus on how his time at Oracle was marked by transformation during a time of upheaval in the IT industry. He explained how he knew it was the right decision to stick to his plan, even in the face of pushback. The following is our story, originally published on April 5.

When Mark Hurd started at Oracle in 2010, he turned the place upside down. Hurd was anticipating a big shift in the industry, and he wanted to change how Oracle built and sold its software.

The changes he made were dramatic. Hundreds of Oracle sales staff members left the company in his first few years on the job, and Hurd was criticized by industry analysts.

But he stuck to his plan. After about six years, the public's perception of that plan started to shift, as hiring and sales ramped up. The company still has a ways to go, as it struggles to catch up to rivals in the cloud software business. But Hurd saw that Oracle, an established company, had to reinvent itself to stay competitive, even when this seemed like a terrible idea.

We spoke with Hurd earlier this year for an episode of Business Insider's podcast "This Is Success" and took a closer look at his first years at Oracle. Hurd explained what it was like initiating a massive culture shift at the company and how his plan continues to unfurl.

In the episode, you'll hear from Hurd about how he's approaching the challenges of developing his cloud business and onboarding waves of new talent — and how his success at Oracle started with a career comeback.

The podcast and a lightly edited transcript are below.

Listen to the full episode, which was produced by Sarah Wyman and Jennifer Sigl, here: 

Subscribe to "This is Success" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. Check out previous episodes with:

• Former race-car driver Danica Patrick
• Grammy-winning DJ Afrojack
• The Daily Beast CEO Heather Dietrick
• "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown

Hurd got the job at Oracle weeks after leaving Hewlett-Packard, where he'd been CEO for five years. The 2010 departure was difficult for him. Even today, it's not something he feels comfortable talking about. Hurd was forced to resign after a public dispute with HP's board over his expense account and a personal relationship. He stepped down that August.

Richard Feloni: How did you feel at the time, given the circumstances, of the departure at HP? Were you angry at all with the situation?

Mark Hurd: No. I liked HP. I liked the company, I liked the people of the company, etc. I had a disagreement with a couple of board members, but that's not HP. If you looked at our financial performance at the time, it was quite positive.

Larry Ellison, who built Oracle and had led it since 1977, came to Hurd's defense. He and Hurd had worked closely while Hurd led HP, and Ellison thought the company made a huge mistake in letting him go. Ellison didn't wait for the situation to blow over, hiring Hurd as Oracle's president a month after Hurd was ousted from HP.

Feloni: So when did he approach you for the Oracle job?

Hurd: We had several meetings about it face-to-face and talked about the industry, the role that Oracle could play within it, the role that I could do in helping Oracle from a strategic perspective. And so we had all of those dialogues as we talked about it.

Oracle makes software that companies around the world use for everyday operations. When Hurd joined the company, the industry was in the early days of shifting to "the cloud." All that means is that the software your head of human resources would use, for example, could be accessed online, from anywhere, rather than installed on a single computer. It's simple in practice but requires major shifts in operations.

Hurd: Well, of course, at the time it was really just the beginnings of all this movement to the cloud, and the implication on Oracle was that we had to change many of the things we were doing, both in R&D and in the go-to-market part of our business. Part of the attraction, of course, is the complexity of all that.

It's one thing when you go to a company that's struggling, and you say, "We've got to change." Most everybody acknowledges that and says, "Gee, I see the results, I see the performance. We have to do something different." It's a very other thing when you go to a company that's winning. And here's a company in Oracle that's winning, that's got tremendous market presence, tremendous brand, and then you say, in the middle of all that, "We've got to change."

The first question that comes up from a lot of people is, well, why would that be? And so then when you have to describe that there's a coming change in the industry it's probably — not probably: I think it's the most difficult leadership challenge that you have is to take a group of people winning and then convince them it's necessary to change. Because there's resistance more than you're typically used to.

Feloni: So this idea of "let's transform even though we're winning and people are comfortable doing things these ways," did that stem from Larry, or was that how you read the situation?

Hurd: We spent a lot of time talking about the industry, because this change was coming, but it was at its very infancy at the time. I think one of the blessings you have with somebody like Larry — and when I say "somebody like," there's not many to compare, frankly, if any, certainly in the enterprise space — is that you have somebody who is a big owner in the company, the biggest owner of the company, that thinks a bit more generationally, certainly than quarterly.

I think if we didn't mutually agree on the need for change, it would never work. It's not like we agree on everything, but the great thing about Larry, amongst many, is that you have a lot of debate. I can't tell you how many times he said, "Yeah, you're right, let's do what you said." And, by the way, the same way for me. We compare notes a lot, talk about a lot, and agree on certainly materially more than we don't. But if it wasn't mutual, it wouldn't work.

Feloni: Your first day as president, your first several days, what did you see at the company that made you think, OK, we're going to have to completely transform the way sales are done here?

Hurd: I think Oracle historically has been thought of as perhaps the greatest sales force in the IT industry, and I wouldn't try to persuade you differently.

Now, all that said, our industry, holistically, had matured into a bad space, in my opinion.

Thirty years ago, when Hurd was starting out in the IT industry, companies would hire entry-level employees and groom them to succeed at the company.

Hurd: You would come out of college, and you would go to work at a company, and you would actually get trained by the company. You'd have trainers, enablers, people that would help you, teach you about how to sell, how to listen, how to communicate — all sorts of great skills that frankly I still use today. Training was looked at as an investment, not as an expense, and what happened over the years is that training again became viewed as an expense as opposed to an investment.

And what began happening was all of this mercenary hiring. You'd go to work for this company, and then you'd go to another company, another company, another company, and it was a bit like all the companies putting their bad salespeople in the middle of the table and we'd just swap bad salespeople, with a strategy that your bad salesperson would be great once they came to our place.

Feloni: So you wanted to kind of bring it back to the world that you had started up in?

Hurd: Yeah, and maybe hopefully a little better than that. Because of the nature of the cloud, what now was a technology that could only be bought by the biggest companies would now be available to every company, no matter what scale. You didn't need to have an IT staff. You didn't need to have a data center. You could just now get all of this great intellectual property basically over the internet.

As a result of that, the need to grow our sales force became very important.

Feloni: Was this essentially for Oracle to survive in this new setting?

Hurd: I'd actually say to thrive. And so it wasn't like we had a problem, you know, if we dial all the way back to 2010, that we had a cash flow problem or we weren't about to make payroll or anything. Again, we were a very successful company saying, in the middle of that success, let's change —

Feloni: You were looking ahead of it.

Hurd: Yeah. So how's this market going to work five years from now?

The cloud was about to revolutionize how the IT industry did business. The product was changing. The customers were changing. And that meant the salespeople had to change too.

Hurd: I would say my view's always been that the more focused you can make a salesperson — meaning the more I can get them to do the same thing every day — the better chance they have of winning. My view has always been to focus them on knowing their product, knowing their buyer, knowing their industry, and, frankly, knowing their competitor.

So the fact that we can bring people to market that are expert at all of these issues raises their chance of success. Now, if you believe that, and I do, then how you then build a sales force becomes important based on those building blocks.

So for us, for example, if we're selling an application like HR, it would become important, if you were a salesperson, that you knew how to communicate to a head of HR. It would be important that you would know your competitor. It would be important that you could describe that discussion in terms of HR in the context of retail or financial services or one of those industries. So that's how we built our sales force, building block by building block, and then we build them appropriately for the markets, all the way from the biggest customer to the smallest customer. That's how we built it.

While Hurd was starting to roll out cloud software, he was still pushing Oracle's core business technology — the stuff the company had been selling for years. And his goals for those sales were ambitious. To encourage his sales force to meet them, he made their paychecks more dependent on their performance. Skeptical employees complained that it created a more complex and stressful work environment.

Hurd: Building incentives are always important, but frankly, if you're building an org, running a company as a CEO, you work on three core things: strategy, operations, and then people. The incentives piece aligned to the operations piece, and the key to operations is to execute the strategy. So in our case, our strategy was to really move the market to this next generation of applications. And then we wanted to incent our sales force properly to move to these next sets of modern applications, which is what we did.

Feloni: You were saying that you have a team that's winning and you want them to change the way they're doing things, you're going to face some resistance.

Hurd:"Some" might be an understatement.

Hundreds of salespeople left the company during Hurd's first few years, including some of the team's top performers. Hurd insists this did not upset his plan.

Hurd: You know, when you have 35,000 or 40,000 people in your sales org, you will have people that move. But I do think we moved from really a products-offered strategy — which is basically we would sell you a product, you would then implement it, sometimes by yourself or with a systems integrator or something like that — we moved to selling a service. So we're really selling a different thing than we had before.

Now we basically said, "No, you're going to have to sell to the functional buyer. You're going to have to sell to that head of HR or to that CFO." Now you're saying to people, "We're going to change what you sell, and we're going to change who you sell it to." And so a lot of people said, "I just don't want to do that." My view is that that's OK. We need to have people that are excited and passionate. I don't want to make it sound like I was for a lot of dynamism in the sales force, but I wasn't against it either.

Feloni: Do you think that you would have felt as confident making huge changes at the company had you not had that specific relationship with Larry?

Hurd: Oh, assuredly not. Assuredly not. I would have had the same belief structure, but when you have the ability to talk through issues with a) people that are extremely smart, b) people that really care, c) people that have a breadth of experience — this is what most CEOs don't have.

Hurd started hiring new people to help carry out his business plan. He didn't want to poach salespeople from his competitors, as was standard in the industry. Instead, he wanted to hire people new to IT — recent college grads — and get them on board with his new vision for the business.

Hurd: We really moved into this very aggressive college hiring program, because what I really thought made sense was us to hire our own. We went back and, of course, we found there were very few IT companies recruiting on campus, believe it or not. Over 85% of the people we offer a job accept that job. The problem we had back then, though, was that we had no machinery.

Feloni: There's no process for it.

Hurd: Yeah. It's like, well, OK, who's going to do that? OK, well, let's get some people that can go do that.

And we figured out where the schools were. We figured out how to recruit. We figured out how to cut an offer letter. But then when we brought them on board, we had to actually train them. So we had to build a strategy to go get, in the US, the best young people in this country, frankly, to put them in the best facilities, which we didn't have, give them the best tools, which we didn't have, give them the best management, which was new because a lot of this was new management mentoring some of these great young people, and give them the best training.

So when you start saying "best, best, best, best, best," and you start with "I've got nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," the whole process over the last few years has been get each one of those pillars I described to being the best at what we do and build our sales force from the ground up.

But some Oracle veterans weren't on board with the new training program. Not only did they essentially have to learn how to do a new job, but they had to mentor some kids straight out of college. A former Oracle employee told Business Insider in 2013 that the company was getting a bad reputation among experienced salespeople in the industry. Hurd says it was just a painful but necessary byproduct of change.

Hurd: At the end of the day, I take complete accountability for the strategy that I described. I believe that it was best for our customers and best for Oracle, for us, to make this change. And no question it was dynamic. No question that when you're part of a dynamic change, anytime you make decisions, you get opinions. There are going to be people that say, "I really liked it the way it was," and, listen, I wish that history was a perfect predictor of the future, but it's not. The world we're in, IT, is dynamic, and it changes. It changes every day. And for us, we needed to stay ahead of this, and there's no question the implication of "staying ahead of this" has some element of pain to it.

Feloni: Did you ever question your strategy?

Hurd: No.

Feloni: No.

Hurd: No.

Feloni: What were conversations with Larry like at this point when there was some turmoil?

Hurd: Probably his biggest quotes would be things like "Can you go faster?"

Feloni: So as a leader, how do you know when to take resistance and be like "OK, let me reconsider," or to think that "OK, this is just the pain of change. I don't have to really dwell on this." How do you differentiate that?

Hurd: I think it's hard. I think nobody likes criticism, resistance, no matter what anybody tells you.

That said, I think you have to rely on your experience, your instincts as to where you think the market's headed and what changes are necessary. I've always believed it was the company first.

I believe to the core that a) we had to expand our salesforce, and b) we couldn't do it through the traditional mechanisms in our industry. We simultaneously moved to the mid-market, we moved to college hiring, we built an in-house training program — we did all of these things simultaneously.

And to add to it, when you ask managers who have historically managed very experienced people, and you say, "Hey, I have an idea. We're going to bring some kids right off the college campus. I'd really appreciate if you'd spent some time mentoring them and developing them," it's amazing that they'd say, "I'd rather not do that." It's counter-instinctive to you, but if you had a sales manager and two people working for you — let's pretend your objectives for the year were $10 million, and you had one salesperson who had a $10 million quota and a second salesperson who had just come out of college — who do you think the sales manager spends all their time with? The person with a $10 million quota.

So we had the issues also from a mores perspective, of just mores of the company, of was it important to really develop and mentor these people —

Feloni: Mentorship would be as important.

Hurd: The company I grew up in, it was just an unspoken value in the company that if you could sit around and brag about all the great people you developed in the company who are now in senior positions, this was a merit badge. This was something you wore on your sleeve. There was no stock option for it — it was just a source of pride and a belief this was the way things were to get done. We needed that inside of our company as well. And we still work on it today.

In 2014, Ellison stepped down as head of Oracle and appointed Hurd and Safra Catz as co-CEOs. As far as Hurd was concerned, the new title didn't change anything. His plan was the same.

Feloni: Did that put a new pressure on you, being given this new title?

Hurd: I don't think I would say it changed. I think we felt the pressure to move the company along, to accelerate the company, to add velocity to the execution of the company, and do that in a way where we can deliver today and build for tomorrow. Because remember, that's our challenge, is that we have a very large customer base that expects us to deliver on products in some cases that we built years and years and years ago. And we have to do that. That's our commitment to them.

Hurd spent years defending his plan to his employees, investors, and industry analysts. And by 2017, the skeptics were coming around to his way of thinking. Even veteran salespeople who had been critical of the big changes Hurd was making at Oracle could see that his plan was paying off. One told The Wall Street Journal that his initial response to Hurd's plan had been "What the hell is this?" but that when he saw how much money the new hires made the company, he changed his mind.

When I read Hurd this quote, he brushed it off, just like the criticisms I'd run past him earlier. Of course his plan worked. That … was the plan.

Hurd: I wouldn't give too much credence to the early anecdote you brought up or to any other anecdote, because I think you can find a lot of these as you dig through a large organization. I think the key is that strategically this was right for us. I believe you will see more people actually imitate that strategy. Because it just makes sense.

Feloni: It sounds like you're not concerned about the media coverage picking different anecdotes for what your plan would say, but would it be different if one of your colleagues approached you, or one of your shareholders approached you, whether it was either skepticism in the first place years ago or saying, like, "I'm really happy with how this is playing out"? Would you consider that differently?

Hurd: Well let me be clear: Of course I'd consider it. I remember one investor saying, "You know, I had bought the stock thinking that you were smart," meaning me, the implication being that they'd flipped their point of view based on the rise in our expense structure. The point that I would make is that in this case we had to invest in order to gain productivity.

Feloni: There's something that I think was interesting. A moment at an Oracle convention in 2016, you had polled the audience about three big industry predictions, which would happen fastest. Forty-two percent said that none of these will ever happen. You joked about it, but is that, like, a recurring thing — where, like, you're met maybe with some skepticism from employees at first and then you have to convince them along the way?

Hurd: What I do frequently at our user conference is I make predictions about the industry. I do them for a couple purposes. One, they're funny, and people have various reactions to them. Second, I try to explain to customers why we're investing the way we are — in particular, products and R&D — because of the secular trends that we see occurring in the industry. For example, we see data centers, corporate data centers, really going away. We see applications that are traditionally on-premise all moving to the cloud.

So we typically make these predictions, and then also we use them internally to show why we're making the adjustments we're making in the various things we do, strategically and operationally. So yeah, I would usually test my predictions on our own workforce, and then you get various reactions like "This is crazy," or "Really, is this going to happen?" It opens up debate, and it's fun.

Feloni: We've been talking about an example where you took something that was really ambitious and it met with some resistance, people even leaving the company — would this be something that you would be willing to do all over again with a new plan?

Hurd: If necessary, yeah. I think that we feel good about strategically where Oracle sits today. We feel good about the changes we've made. I'm not here to tell you that everything we've done we've done perfectly, but I am here to tell you that we feel very good about the decisions we've made, the investments we've made. We've continued to make changes where necessary, maybe at a lesser scale, within the context of a product or a solution or various other parts of the company. We would always be dynamic in that nature.

Feloni: And looking at it, do you think that maybe there could have been a different way to communicate that to staff to maybe keep some of those veteran hires from leaving?

Hurd: I'm not sure that's the approach you would want to take. I think that a leader's job is to describe: "This is where we're headed. This is where we are. This is the journey to get from here to there. These are now the resources we're going to apply to get from here to there."

I tried to do some explaining of things like training and changes in our compensation, our incentives, our management, etc. There are people who say, "Listen, I'm just not up for that." You're talking about things that are going to require work and change. Some people are up for it, and some people are not. I think if you don't have passion and you're not excited about the task at hand, the likelihood that you'd have as much success as you're having is very unlikely.

You know, I think we want people that are excited about the mission, and I don't really enjoy saying this, but some of that is necessary to get from here to there.

Feloni: So if you have an ambitious plan and some people aren't signed on to it, that's OK?

Hurd: You know, you hate to say it that way, because it feels like it's a non-empathetic answer, but the answer is yes. When you say, "Listen, we're going move from here to there," not everybody is going to like it, and as a result, if somebody wants to opt out because they don't like it, in the end, I do think that's OK.

Feloni: Looking at the last eight years or so at Oracle, how would you say that your leadership style has changed over that time, if it has?

Hurd: I don't change my view. You need to lead from in front. And to me, for us, that's with our customers and with our people. And so that's still my primary view, that communicating to our customers, communicating to our people, is important.

I still believe the role of leading these companies is about strategy. It is about aligning the operations to the execution of the strategy and then really surrounding the company with the best possible people.

You know, we're all faced with, in any of these jobs, making hundreds and thousands of decisions every day — doesn't mean that you're going to get them all right. I have confidence enough though in the process that if I make a decision, I'm willing to listen if I've made a bad decision. Let's review it and do it again.

You asked a simple question to begin with: Do I feel confident in the strategy of Oracle? I do.

Feloni: Well, thank you, Mark.

Hurd: Thank you.

SEE ALSO: The US CEO of Siemens got told all the time that she wasn’t 'executive material,' and it taught her the most important leadership lesson of her career

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• Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, died on Friday.
• The 62-year-old chief executive had been on medical leave from the company since September.
• Before joining Oracle, Hurd was the chairman, CEO, and president at Hewlett-Packard. He resigned in 2010 amid allegations of sexual harassment surfaced against him. He was widely credited with the company's dominance in computing hardware during his tenure.
• Hurd began his career at NCR Corp., where he worked for 25 years and eventually rose to occupy the CEO chair.
• Here's a look back at the life and career of Mark Hurd.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Mark Hurd, one of Oracle's two CEOs, died on Friday at age 62.

Hurd led the database giant with Safra Catz since 2014, though he had announced a medical leave of absence in September. He and Catz had been hired by then-CEO Larry Ellison as copresidents of Oracle in 2010, before taking over as joint CEOs when Ellison stepped aside.

Read More: Oracle employees and tech workers mourn CEO Mark Hurd, who died at the age of 62

Hurd spent most of his career at NCR Corp., an enterprise technology company specializing in point-of-sale systems and ATM machines. After 25 years, Hurd had risen to the chief executive role before moving over to run computing giant Hewlett-Packard. He was widely credited with making HP into the dominant player in hardware computing during his tenure, a trait that Ellison highly valued when deciding to recruit Hurd to Oracle in 2010.

At Oracle, he was known for spearheading its push into the cloud, playing a major role in its growth.

Here's a look at the life and career of Mark Hurd:

Mark Hurd was born on January 1, 1957, in Manhattan, New York.

Source: Bloomberg

He attended Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame High School, in Miami, Florida. He graduated in 1975.

Source: Archdiocese of Miami

He attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, on a tennis scholarship (where he later had a tennis center named after him). He graduated with a degree in business administration in 1979.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

After graduation, Hurd became a junior salesman at NCR Corp. in San Antonio, Texas. The company specialized in point-of-sale systems and ATMs.

Source: Fortune

Hurd worked for NCR for 25 years in a variety of roles, including management, operations, sales, and marketing.

Source: Fortune

By 2001, he was named president of NCR. In 2002, he was named chief operating officer of the organization.

Source: Fortune

But perhaps his biggest role was overseeing the company’s Teradata data-warehousing division, which NCR acquired in 1999. The tech-centric role would be key for Hurd’s move into enterprise computing after his tenure at NCR.

Source: Fortune

He eventually landed the CEO job in 2003, where he remained until 2005.

Source: Fortune

After leaving NCR, Hurd joined computing giant Hewlett-Packard as CEO following Carly Fiorina’s ouster in 2005.

Source: CNN

Hurd was one of HP’s first CEOs to also hold the title of president, but he was not appointed as chairman of the board of directors until 2006.

Source: CNN

Hurd is widely credited with growing HP into the computing powerhouse it became through sales of personal computers, laptops, and home printers. Over five years, including the 2008 recession, Hurd had overseen consistent revenue gains that some attributed to his aggressive cost-cutting strategies.

Source: Bloomberg

During his tenure, Hurd was named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful People in Business, San Francisco Chronicle’s CEO of the Year, and one of Forbes' "top gun" CEOs.

Sources: Fortune, San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes

Hurd eventually resigned from HP in August 2010 after a contractor accused him of sexual harassment. Although an investigation did not find Hurd to be in violation of HP’s code of conduct, it did find irregularities in his expense reports.

Source: Wall Street Journal

One month later, Hurd joined Oracle as president with Safra Catz, with the two taking over for Charles Phillips. Hurd also joined Oracle’s board of directors.

Source: CNET

Hurd and Catz were appointed joint CEOs in 2014 by then-CEO Larry Ellison, who had announced he was stepping down and taking the role of chief technology officer.

Source: USA Today

Under Hurd and Catz, Oracle revamped its sales structure and began the process of moving the business to focus on cloud computing — an area where it's historically been outstripped by rivals including Amazon and Microsoft.

Source: Fortune

Hurd announced that he was taking a medical leave of absence in September, making Catz the sole CEO at Oracle.

Source: CNN

On Friday, October 18, the company announced that Hurd had died at 62. He's survived by his wife, Paula, and two daughters.

Source: Business Insider

• Once Oracle and the tech industry finishes mourning the untimely death of Mark Hurd, the database giant has some big decisions to make.
• For the last several years, Oracle has successfully run under a triumvirate, with CEO Safra Catz running finance, cofounder and CTO Larry Ellison running engineering/product, and CEO Hurd running Oracle's enormous sales and marketing machine.
• Catz is more than qualified to run the company by herself. The question is: does she want to?
• Larry Ellison has previously said that he would provide Oracle's board with a list of five internal candidates who could step up and take Hurd's place, and even tossed out some names.
• But while there are plenty of executives who helped Hurd run pieces of his job, no one person has all the qualifications, an insider tells us.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

While the IT industry is mourning the death of CEO Mark Hurd at age 62, the sad truth is that, as a global company, Oracle must quickly push on. What will it do without Hurd, who was playing a crucial role at the company at a pivotal time?

First things first: Safra Catz has to decide if she wants to continue on as sole CEO.

Now read: Larry Ellison's email to employees honored the memory of 'brilliant and beloved' Oracle CEO Mark Hurd

Catz is only 57, and has been on Oracle's board of directors since 2001. She's the financial genius at Oracle — the one who finds a way to profitably execute founder and CTO Larry Ellison's vision, whether that's a multi-billion hostile takeover or dozens of pricey new data centers. For that reason, she's been called "the enforcer." 

For decades she has historically led finance, M&A, human resources and legal at Oracle, with Hurd in charge of the massive sales and marketing apparatus.

As one of Oracle's long-time execs who helped orchestrate its dominance in the tech world, she is perhaps more intimately knowledgeable of all of Oracle's moving parts than anyone except Ellison himself. While she's perfectly capable of running Oracle with Ellison, as they did for years before Hurd arrived, it's not clear if she wants to.

She's previously said she loved the three-headed executive setup that's been in place since Hurd joined the company as co-president in 2010.

For instance, back in 2015, she told reporters at a rare press conference: "As co-CEO, we have so much fun. Whenever I'm away, I miss our crowd, Larry and Mark. I was so excited to see Mark one day, I gave him a big hug."

Hurd was the operations guy, running sales, customer and technical support, business development, marketing, and —known as a cost-cutter — he kept watch over business unit revenue, a source tells us.

Ellison is the visionary, overseeing engineering and product development and is still the buck-stops-here decision maker.

But Catz has always been fiercely private and has avoided the spotlight. The downside to being sole CEO is the increased visibility it brings. Hurd was the one to appear on the business shows, to do the press interviews, to speak on stage, or to schmooze large gatherings of customers.

And this is a critical time for the company as it makes the leap from traditional IT hardware/software vendor into cloud computing. If it fails, Oracle will find itself a relic at best, or at worst, a goner like EMC or Digital Equipment Corp.

Last month, after Hurd took medical leave, Ellison said that he was sending the board of directors a list of five internal candidates who could be named CEO with her if Hurd could not resume his duties.

It won't be Ellison

At the time, Ellison said that he himself was not interested in the CEO job again. 

He named two possibilities for that short list: Steve Miranda, executive vice president of Oracle Applications product development, who's been with the company since 1992; and Don Johnson, vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and product development.

Read more: Larry Ellison is giving Oracle's board 5 internal candidates to be considered as the next CEO

But one person familiar with these executives told Business Insider that their backgrounds are more technical, and that they specialize in R&D and engineering. Hurd's job was on the sales and marketing side.

Dave Donatelli might have the chops for the role, a former employee tells us. He's been running Oracle's all-important cloud business, including product marketing and business development, reporting to Hurd, Prior to that, Donatelli was at HP, a general manager responsible for HP's enormous enterprise equipment business. But he really spent most of his career at EMC, before going to HP.

Donatelli was, at one time, rumored to be on the short list for CEO of HP after Hurd resigned that job. But he's never been a CEO, much less of an organization as large and complex as Oracle which makes everything from computer chips to open source software.

A former Oracle employee also points out that Judy Sim, who has been leading Oracle's marketing and PR for a long time, could also help Catz or another chief exec lighten the load — but her background doesn't include the more complicated areas of Hurd's purview, like developing sales compensation plans and incentives.

Happier investors

Whether or not they're tapped to become CEO, having those executives around means that Catz could very well have the support she needs to go solo, should she be willing to handle the increased visibility.

And if Catz decides to go it alone, Oracle's investors may be happy about it.

Shareholders have grumbled for years over how much Oracle pays its top heavy executive suite, with a long history of voting "no" on the annual advisory vote on CEO pay. Oracle was also named the No. 2 on the list of companies with the most overpaid CEOs by governance watchdog group As You Sow. 

But one thing's for certain: Oracle needs to decide and let the world know, or it will face endless questions from employees, investors and customers about its leadership plans.

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Oracle and SAP, longtime rivals, are going through major leadership changes at the same time.
• Safra Catz is now the sole CEO of Oracle, following the death of co-CEO Mark Hurd — though founder Larry Ellison has made it clear that he likes the dual-CEO concept for the company.
• SAP's longtime CEO Bill McDermott has stepped down to take over cloud software giant ServiceNow. He's been replaced by two exec team members, Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein, as co-CEOs.
• Analysts say the changes could define the way the two tech giants adapt to the cloud, which has disrupted the enterprise software market which they have long dominated.
• The leaders of Oracle and SAP have increasingly had to send a message to the business world that they are also key players in the cloud, where they are facing newer and more nimble competitors like Salesforce and Workday.
• One analyst thinks Larry Ellison, given his star power, could return as CEO to be the much-needed public face for Oracle at a time when the company is battling it out with stronger cloud rivals.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Oracle and SAP are each going through major changes to their leadership. That can be tough for any business, but it's certainly trickier for tech giants facing a shifting market.

Safra Catz is now the sole CEO of Oracle, following the death last week of co-CEO Mark Hurd after going on medical leave. That said, Oracle founder Larry Ellison had previously indicated that the company is looking to maintain its dual-CEO structure – meaning the company has a decision to make.

At SAP, longtime CEO Bill McDermott just stepped down, and will be the new CEO of ServiceNow. He's been replaced by two exec team members, Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein, as the German behemoth pivots back to a dual-CEO leadership structure of its own.

'A delicate dance to the cloud'

These changes are taking place at a time when Oracle and SAP, the world's biggest enterprise software vendors, are doing what an analyst called "a delicate dance to the cloud" as they adapt to the new ways businesses, including major corporations, buy and consume applications. 

Over the past few years, the leaders of Oracle and SAP have had to focus on a key goal: to send a message to the business world that they, too, are major players in a trend that is disrupting a market they have dominated for more than three decades.

It's not easy for two tech behemoths, born in the earliest days of the IT industry — one analyst compared the two companies to dancing elephants. 

"You're asking which of the two elephants are dancing better," Ian Campbell, CEO of Nucleus Research, a tech market research firm, told Business Insider, when asked which company has done a better job adapting to the cloud.

"You have two large companies with a lot of history," he said. "It is a much more delicate dance moving to the cloud, when you've been around for 20, 30 years in the market."

The cloud disrupted a market SAP and Oracle had dominated

For more than 30 years, SAP and Oracle have dominated the market for software that businesses used to manage important tasks, including payroll, finances, human resources and customer relations. Businesses typically paid hefty licensing and maintenance fees to have these applications installed in their in-house data centers.

Then came the cloud. 

Businesses can now access applications through the web, often allowing them to scale down or abandon private data centers And they can now pay for software on a pay-as-you-go, subscription-based plan, usually based on the number of users, avoiding expensive multi-year contracts.

"The cloud world is very different from a world when projects took years to implement and you can count on loyalty for decades," Morgan, SAP's new co-CEO, told Business Insider in a recent interview. "Now, it's a game of days and weeks and months. And customers choose you every single day."

Oracle and SAP found themselves facing new rivals, such as Salesforce and Workday. These so-called cloud native players have been winning over not just new companies, but also big corporations — including Oracle and SAP's customers.

Mark Hurd as a great sales leader

It's a complicated dance where having a skilled, experienced and high-profile salesman as CEO is important. Hurd has been widely praised for playing that role for Oracle.

Jean Bozman, vice president of tech research rim Hurwitz and Associates, said that Hurd's "absence was felt" soon after he first went on medical leave, when he didn't attend the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Now that the worst has occurred, it will take a while to understand the void he left behind. 

"The news about the passing of Mark Hurd is sudden, and the impact of this loss will need to be understood by Wall Street, Oracle's employees, and by Oracle's customers, who met often with Mark Hurd in customer councils and conferences," Bozman told Business Insider. 

Gartner analyst Ted Friedman echoed this view, saying "Mark's big value to the organization was that he was a great sales leader," and that he'll be difficult for Ellison and Oracle to replace. 

"He was a very charismatic sales leader," he told Business Insider. "He was very good at getting alignment and driving effectiveness of the sales teams. So I think that characteristic has got to be top of mind for Larry and the board as they consider candidates."

Should Larry Ellison become CEO once again?

It is possible that Oracle would choose to have Catz, whose leadership has been widely praised, continue serving as a solo CEO. Campbell of Nucleus Research described her as a "really fantastic" leader who played an important role as "a strong back-end operations person."

But beyond Ellison's stated preference that Oracle have two CEOs, Campbell also said that "Oracle is going to need a more forward-facing evangelist," which is not known to be one of the famously attention-averse Catz's strengths. 

And he thinks Oracle can have such an evangelist leading it again — if Larry Ellison himself would return as CEO.

"Larry Ellison could certainly play that role," he said of Ellison returning as CEO. "It might not be a bad role for him to come back into and to drive the market again. He's had a bit of a rest, if you will, by not doing the day to day stuff, and I'd say, of all the choices, that wouldn't be a bad one for Oracle."

Ellison, who founded Oracle in 1977 and who has long been one of the most famous Silicon Valley executives, stepped down as CEO in 2014, although he remained as executive chairman and chief technology officer.

"Certainly, the charisma factor is there,"  Friedman of Gartner said when asked about the possibility of Ellison's return. "Obviously, he so deeply respected and admired across the company. I would imagine those would be characteristics that would serve him well."

But Friedman noted that there has been no indication that Ellison is considering returning as CEO. During last month's OpenWorld event, he actually mentioned two executives who could one day step into the role: Don Johnson, head of Oracle cloud infrastructure business, and Steve Miranda, who leads the company's applications development.

Bozman said Oracle clearly has "a deep bench. There are a lot of people who can help run this company in the future." But the big question is do they have the star power of a Larry Ellison, which is key for maintaining and expanding Oracle's relationships with the top executives of major corporations. 

Bill McDermott's new gig

This ability is crucial in building and maintaining ties with businesses, including big corporations, that now have far more options than in the past. This need was underscored last week when McDermott, Ellison's longtime rival at SAP,  made his first appearance as incoming ServiceNow CEO.

During ServiceNow's earnings call, an analyst asked McDermott to share his thoughts on reaching out to the CEOs and CIOs of current and potential customers.  Outgoing CEO John Donahoe, who has been named to lead Nike, responded first by highlighting the important, high-level relationships McDermott has developed through the years as head of SAP.

"I have to say...Bill McDermott makes my Rolodex look paltry in terms of his relationship with CEOs all over the world," Donahoe said. 

"The rolodex is really strong," McDermott added, noting that he and Donahoe "recognize the power of power."

"It's really been an honor to operate at that level," he added. "And the altitude up there is nice and clear and it helps the conversations down below to take place faster, better and bigger."

A surprise in timing

Cambell of Nucleus Research said McDermott's decision to step down at SAP "was a little bit of a surprise in timing."

"Certainly he's had a good run, and we've seen a lot of great things with SAP," he said.  "Their biggest challenge going forward is integration. What they've done is buy a lot of applications through acquisitions. They've  been on a buying spree."

Over the past year alone, SAP has bought such cloud companies as Qualtrics, Callidus Software and Coresystems, in pricey deals that could sometimes make its investors nervous.

Shortly before stepping down, McDermott explained the roles his successors, Morgan and Klein, will play.

Klein, who had been SAP's chief operating officer, will focus on the company's flagship product, its suite of enterprise applications. Morgan, who has served as SAP president, will continue focusing on the tech giant's cloud business, which has been growing largely through acquisitions like that of Qualtrics.

"Jennifer is focused on the cloud business which is mainly all the acquired companies of SAP,"he told CNBC. "So we entrusted $30 billion or so of acquired companies in her hands."

SAP's new CEOs already making moves

Morgan plunged into her new role as co-CEO last week when he announced a key partnership with Microsoft, a competitor in the traditional enterprise software market that is now one of the three main cloud providers, which includes Amazon and Google. 

It underscored another strategy that Oracle, which recently also unveiled a partnership with Microsoft, and SAP have had to embrace as they adapt to the cloud, forming alliances, including with longtime rivals, 

"A lot of times with companies today, everything is about either I win or you win," she told Business Insider of the decision to work with Microsoft, a longtime rival. "It's not a zero-sum game anymore."

Got a tip about SAP, Oracle or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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• Marc Benioff hosted the fourth Rebels With A Cause Gala at The Water Garden in Santa Monica on Thursday, a representative for USC told Business Insider.
• At the last Rebels With A Cause Gala in 2016, Benioff's friend and former boss Larry Ellison made a $200 million donation to USC; at this year's gala, he was honored for the donation.
• The event raised over $12 million for the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Marc and Lynne Benioff know how to throw a party.

The billionaire couple hosted the fourth annual Rebels With a Cause Gala on Thursday in a Santa Monica office park. The event benefited research at USC's Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine. Ellison — a close friend and former mentor of Benioff's — was there alongside Ashton Kutcher and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Keep reading to take a look inside the event, which is held every third year and always benefits cancer research.

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The Gala was held in the Los Angeles area in Santa Monica, California ...

... in the courtyard of an office park called The Water Garden.

A gated entrance flanked by security guards kept onlookers from wandering inside.

The glass tables were decorated with silver accessories and white flowers; the event was designed by AOO Events.

Women also walked the event wearing lampshades.

Marc and Lynne Benioff hosted.

Guests included Ashton Kutcher and USC research Dr. David Agus' children ...

... original Fab 5 member Jai Rodriguez ...

... Japanese musician Yoshiki Hayashi ...

... Barry Manilow and Lorna Luft ...

... and Canadian musician David Foster and his daughter, 90210 star Sara Foster.

The elder Foster performed at the event ...

... as did the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

James Corden was the gala's emcee.

The 350 guests were served dinner ...

... and signature cocktails called "Love" and "Hope," inspired by the cancer research the event was planned to fund.

A representative of USC told Business Insider the event's 350 guests paid between $1,000 for a single ticket and $100,000 for a table to attend.

At this year's gala, Ellison was honored for the $200 million donation he made to USC at the last Rebels With A Cause Gala in 2016. He received a standing ovation.

“[He’s] one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met," Agus said of Ellison while presenting the award. "Every day I thank him for his love for discourse to push for knowledge and truth. I thank him for allowing me to learn from him. Cancer continues to affect us all and we’re obligated to think outside of the box. With Ellison’s support and the $12.1 million raised this evening, we’re able to continue developing innovative programs at the Ellison Institute that our patients need today.”

The award itself was designed by Chopard.

Benioff and Ellison have a 30-year bromance that began when Ellison took Benioff under his wing and turned Benioff into a star executive at Oracle.

Source: Business Insider

All in all, the event raised over $12 million for the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC.

• Some of the world's richest people in tech have a fairly modest taste when it comes to cars. 
• Find out what Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are driving. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Some of the world's most successful tech moguls have a fairly modest taste when it comes to picking cars to drive. 

In fact, the world's richest man, the CEO and founder of Amazon – Jeff Bezos – was seen driving a Honda Accord as recently as 2013.

With this in mind, we decided to find out what the vehicle of choice is for some of the other big names in tech. Scroll on to find out what the tech titans are driving:

SEE ALSO: The 35 celebrities and athletes who make the most money per Instagram post, ranked

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is worth $72.3 billion which makes him the fifth richest person in the world.

Despite this, Zuckerberg has far from extravagant tastes when it comes to cars, clothes, and travel. 

He's been seen in a black Acura TSX, a Volkswagen hatchback, and a Honda Fit, all of which are valued at or under $30,000.

Jeff Bezos

Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, is currently the richest person in the world yet he doesn't seem to be too fussed about splashing out on expensive cars.

According to the book "The Everything Store," Bezos was still driving a Honda Accord as recently as 2013. That said, Bezos does own a $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet.

Read more:A day in the life of the richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos — who runs the second US company to join the $1 trillion club and still washes the dishes after dinner

Elon Musk

As CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk's choice of wheels won't be a huge surprise. 

In a recent tweet, Musk revealed that he does have favorites and mostly drives the Tesla Model S Performance, which costs around $90,000 and was recently awarded the best car among a selection of "cars of the year."

He also said he occasionally drives Tesla's Model 3 Performance and Model X when he's with his kids.

In addition to driving Teslas, Musk also drives and owns a Ford Model T and a Jaguar E-Type Series 1 Roadster.

But perhaps his most impressive car is the 1976 Lotus Esprit submarine car, which was used in the 1977 James Bond movie film, "The Spy Who Loved Me," which he bought at auction in London for $997,000.

Bill Gates

Gates is reportedly an avid luxury-car collector. He told Ellen DeGeneres in a recent interview that his biggest splurge after founding Microsoft was buying a Porsche 911 supercar, which he later sold. In 2012, one of its new owners sold it at auction for $80,000.

Experts say one of the best cars in his collection today is his Porsche 959 sports car.

Michael Dell

Michael Dell is known for having a lavish real estate portfolio, with properties in Austin, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. He also has his fair share of luxury cars. These have included a 2004 Porsche Boxster, a Porsche Carrera GT, and a Hummer H2.

Larry Ellison

Ellison is the founder and CEO of Oracle and is known for his extravagant spending habits. He collects real estate, cars, airplanes, and yachts. 

When it comes to cars, his collection has included an Audi R8, McLaren F1, Lexus LFA, and the Lexus LS 600h L, according to the LA Times. 

He's also known for giving his friends expensive gifts including an Acura NSX, which costs more than $100,000.

Jack Ma

Jack is the former chairman and cofounder of Alibaba Group, China's biggest e-commerce company. He is one of the richest people in the world.

But you wouldn't be able to tell it from his choice of car. Ma reportedly drives a Roewe RX5 SUV, which costs from $15,000.

Travis Kalanick

As the former CEO of Uber, Kalanick should be spending his money on anything but cars. 

But Kalanick admitted in 2016 that he does own a 1999 BMW M3 convertible but said that the alternator is broken and his driver's license is expired. 

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are currently the 10th and 11th richest people in the world, which means that personal jets and yachts aren't much of a stretch for them. 

However, the Google duo are more conservative when it comes to their car choices and have both owned Toyota Prius'.

Richard Branson

Self-made billionaire businessman Richard Branson is the man behind Virgin Group and is worth $5.32 billion. 

While Branson spends some of his time jetting around on his private plane, he also drives a Range Rover, which is gifted to him each year by the brand. In a recent interview, Branson said that his first car was a 1968 Morris Minor. 

• Oracle is considering naming a president who could be groomed to replace Mark Hurd, the tech giant's co-CEO who died last month, according to a Bloomberg report.
• Oracle had said it plans to maintain its dual CEO structure, but the company is now planning to name a president first to give that executive time to grow into the role, the report said.
• Hurd died last month after taking a leave for medical reasons, leaving Safra Catz as Oracle's sole CEO.
• Before Hurd's passing, founder and chairman Larry Ellison had told analysts that he plans to send five internal candidates for future CEO to the Oracle board. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Oracle is considering naming a president who could be groomed to take the place of Mark Hurd, the tech giant's co-CEO who died last month, according to a Bloomberg report.

Oracle had indicated that it was planning to name a new co-CEO to Safra Catz, but the software behemoth is now likely to appoint a president first to give that executive time to grow into the CEO role, the report said, citing unnamed sources.

A spokesperson for Oracle declined to comment.

Hurd died last month, leaving Catz as Oracle's sole CEO. Founder and Chairman Larry Ellison had said that the company plans to maintain its dual CEO leadership structure and he was planning to present five internal candidates to the Oracle board.

Ellison publicly mentioned two potential candidates — Steve Miranda, the company's cloud applications chief, and Don Johnson, who leads Oracle's cloud infrastructure business. Sources also mentioned three other possible candidates to Business Insider's Julie Bort.

The leadership is taking place at a time when Oracle is trying to strengthen its position in the cloud where it is competing with rivals led by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Got a tip about Orace or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentelor send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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• America's 10 wealthiest people gave an average of 0.94% of their net worths to charity in 2018, according to a new analysis of the charitable contributions of America's wealthiest people by UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman.
• Of all the multibillionaires on this list, only Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg gave more than 1% of their net worths to charity in 2018.
• Three of America's richest billionaires gave 0.0% of their net worths to charity in 2018.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Billionaires aren't as generous as they may let on, a new analysis of the charitable contribution of America's wealthiest people by UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman reveals.

America's 10 wealthiest people gave an average of 0.94% of their net worths to charity in 2018, according to Zucman. To compile the ranking, Zucman used data from the Forbes 400 and the magazine's America's Top 50 Givers lists in 2018.

Of all the multibillionaires on this list, only Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg gave more than 1% of their net worths to charity in 2018. Some of the low figures can be explained by the "lumpy" nature of charitable giving, according to Vox's Dylan Matthews— billionaires often make large lump-sum gifts, with other, smaller donations in between.

Google cofounder Sergey Brin for example, gave 0.0% of his net worth to charity in 2018 according to Zucman's analysis, but gave $2.2 billion between 2000 and 2017 according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Several of the billionaires on this list, including Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, have also signed onto the Giving Pledge, promising that they will give away the majority of their fortunes before or after they die.

Keep reading to learn how much money the richest men in America gave to charity in 2018, arranged in order of increasing total net worths as of 2018.

All figures are sourced from the 2018 editions of the Forbes 400 and America's Top 50 Givers lists.

SEE ALSO: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have both proposed taxes on the ultra-wealthy. Here's how much poorer America's 10 wealthiest billionaires would be under a moderate wealth tax.

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10. Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is one of three billionaires on this list who gave more than 1% of their net worths to charity in 2018.

Net worth in October 2018: $51.8 billion

2018 charitable giving: $767 million

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 1.5%

In 2018, Bloomberg pledged to give $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University to fund financial aid for low and middle-income students. The fund will likely be paid out over a number of years.

The former mayor of New York City built his fortune running Bloomberg LP, a financial data and media company, Business Insider previously reported. In a recent investigation, Business Insider's Becky Peterson, J.K. Trotter, and Nicole Einbinder detailed two decades' worth of legal complaints against Bloomberg, with multiple women alleging that he enabled senior men to target less senior women in the organization for sex.

9. Despite being a leading philanthropist in years past, Google cofounder Sergey Brin didn't donate much in 2018.

Net worth in October 2018: $52.4 billion

2018 charitable giving: $25 million*

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 0.0%

Brin, 46, founded the search engine in a garage in California in 1998 with Larry Page, Business Insider previously reported.

Brin donated $2.2 billion between 2000 and 2017 primarily to fund Parkinson's research and underserved populations through his Brin Wojcicki Foundation and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

*Per Zucman's analysis, those billionaires who didn't appear on Forbes' 2018 "America's Top 50 Givers" ranking were assigned a donation amount of $25 million, which is the amount the lowest-ranked person on the givers list donated (and therefore represents the most an unlisted billionaire may have given in 2018). Brin's actual 2018 giving amount is unknown.

8. David Koch gave away $54 million in 2018, before passing away in August.

Net worth in October 2018: $53.5 billion

2018 charitable giving: $54 million

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 0.1%

Koch's death followed a long battle with prostate cancer, Business Insider previously reported. Koch donated millions of dollars to the Prostate Cancer Foundation before his death. He was also a major patron of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

7. Charles Koch gave away five times more money than his brother did in 2018.

Net worth in October 2018: $53.5 billion

2018 charitable giving: $245 million

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 0.5%

Koch controlled industrial giant Koch Industries alongside his late brother, David. The two have been known for their donations to conservative causes, Business Insider previously reported. In 2018, Koch Industries gave $1,325,115 to congressional candidates, with some of the top recipients of the Kochs' money being Republicans Marsha Blackburn, Orrin Hatch, Lee Zeldin, Ron Estes, and Karen Handle.

6. Larry Page gave away significantly more money in 2018 than his business partner.

Net worth in October 2018: $53.8 billion

2018 charitable giving: $25 million*

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 0.0%

Page, 46, is the CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, Business Insider previously reported.

Page donated hundreds of thousands of Google shares to the Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, named after his father, Business Insider previously reported. Through both the foundation and Google, Page pledged $25 million in 2014 to fight Ebola.

*Per Zucman's analysis, those billionaires who didn't appear on Forbes' 2018 "America's Top 50 Givers" ranking were assigned a donation amount of $25 million, which is the amount the lowest-ranked person on the givers list donated (and therefore represents the most an unlisted billionaire may have given in 2018). Page's actual 2018 giving amount is unknown.

5. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison is one of three billionaires on this list who gave 0.0% of his net worth to charity in 2018.

Net worth in October 2018: $58.4 billion

2018 charitable giving: $25 million*

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 0.0%

Ellison, 74, is known for having a playboy reputation, Business Insider previously reported.

In past years, Ellison has donated millions to educational and healthcare causes through the Lawrence Ellison Foundation, Business Insider previously reported. Notable donations include $200 million toward a USC cancer research center, and $100 million to help eliminate polio.

*Per Zucman's analysis, those billionaires who didn't appear on Forbes' 2018 "America's Top 50 Givers" ranking were assigned a donation amount of $25 million, which is the amount the lowest-ranked person on the givers list donated (and therefore represents the most an unlisted billionaire may have given in 2018). Ellison's actual 2018 giving amount is unknown.

4. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg does most of his charitable giving through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the private foundation he funds alongside his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan.

Net worth in October 2018: $61 billion

2018 charitable giving: $410 million

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 0.7%

Zuckerberg became a billionaire at age 23 after founding the social networking site, Business Insider previously reported. At the time, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Forbes has since given that title to Kylie Jenner, whose cosmetics line made her a billionaire at age 21.

Zuckerberg and Chan, have donated more than $1 billion toward education and medical research, including a multimillion-dollar donation to a San Francisco hospital later named after Zuckerberg, Business Insider previously reported. The couple created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015 to focus on"personalized learning, curing diseases, and connecting people." When they announced the Initiative's launch, Zuckerberg and Chan also pledged they would give away 99% of their Facebook shares to charity during their lifetimes.

3. Warren Buffett, however, prefers to give to the foundation run by his friends (and fellow billionaires) Bill and Melinda Gates.

Net worth in October 2018: $88.3 billion

2018 charitable giving: $3.4 billion

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 3.9%

The "Oracle of Omaha" founded and serves as the CEO of conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, Business Insider previously reported.

Buffett announced in July that he would give away $3.6 billion to five charities, including the Gates Foundation.

2. Bill Gates is a full-time philanthropist and the second-largest donor on this list after Buffett.

Net worth in October 2018: $97 billion

2018 charitable giving: $2.5 billion

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 2.6%

The Microsoft founder and full-time philanthropist recently faced criticism for his connections to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Business Insider previously reported.

The Gates family has donated more than $36 billion since the foundation launched in 2000, and Bill Gates has also donated billions-worth of Microsoft stock to the organization, Business Insider previously reported. The Gates family, along with Warren Buffett, launched the Giving Pledge together in 2010.

1. Jeff Bezos has previously been criticized for not giving enough to charity and for his refusal to sign the Giving Pledge.

Net worth in October 2018: $160 billion

2018 charitable giving: $131 million

Giving as a percentage of net worth: 0.1%

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is currently the richest person alive, after briefly losing that title to Gates earlier this month. However, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault could surpass them both after his company's record-breaking acquisition of Tiffany, Business Insider previously reported.

Bezos's nonprofit Day One Fund donated $98.5 million to multiple charities fighting homelessness, CNBC reported on November 21.

• As 2020 begins, experts say they expect Oracle to focus on making key changes to its top leadership and to fill the void left by CEO Mark Hurd's death.
• Hurd had played a key role in transforming Oracle's sales organization to make it more effective in the cloud market. Experts see the tech giant bringing in new leaders who could build on what he had accomplished.
• Oracle is expected to focus on acquisitions as a way of strengthening its position in the cloud. Experts also see the tech company opening up to more partnerships following last year's new alliances with Microsoft and VMware.
• "We need a kinder and gentler Oracle," VMware CIO Bask Iyer told Business Insider. "I would expect them to work with every cloud provider, every leading vendor. They have to coexist."
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Oracle kicks off the 2020s facing questions about how its top leadership could change and whether its cloud strategy could finally take off.  The corporate giant will also be at center stage of a major tech showdown as Oracle's 10-year-old legal brawl with Google goes before the US Supreme Court.

The tech giant ended 2019 on a sad note with the death of CEO Mark Hurd, leaving Safra Catz as solo CEO with founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison playing a more prominent role. Hurd had played a critical role for Oracle's strategy and experts expect the tech giant to focus this year on filling the void he left, as it grapples with its biggest challenge: the cloud.

While Oracle is dominant in the traditional enterprise tech market, particularly for business software installed in in-house data centers, it has struggled against rivals in the cloud, the fast-growing market that lets businesses to set up networks and access applications on web-based platforms.

"To state the obvious, Oracle is undergoing a deep cloud transformation like all major incumbents in the industry," Christian Primeau, global CEO of Syntax, a cloud management services company that works with Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft, told Business Insider.

Caught in two battles

Jefferies analyst Brent Thill pointed to two key battlegrounds where Oracle is facing challenges.

"They are caught in the middle of two battles in infrastructure and applications, which is not a great position," he told Business Insider. "In infrastructure, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are cutting off the oxygen, and in apps other vendors are driving faster innovation like Salesforce, Adobe, Workday, among others."

Cloud infrastructure covers the basic components of a cloud platform, including access to servers and storage. Oracle is making a big push to be a major player in this space with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), but many experts have been unimpressed with its efforts.

In fact, Oracle has reeled from criticism that it did not embrace the cloud fast enough.

"Oracle is so late to this, that they've really lost developer and IT mindshare to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google," JMP Securities analyst Pat Walravens told Business Insider in a recent interview. "So looking forward, are they going to be able to get that mindshare back?"

Primeau said he thinks Oracle's cloud infrastructure will gain some traction this year, but said he doesn't see the tech giant's platform posing a serious challenge to the market leaders. "At this stage, it is really a 2-plus-1 leaders race: AWS and Azure plus Google," he said.

Strength in cloud software

Oracle is a strong player in cloud applications, a segment also referred to as software-as-a-service. Primeau said Oracle cloud-based financial products are particularly strong. "I see them continuing investing heavily and continue doing well with these very strategic product lines," he said.

But Oracle is hardly dominant in cloud applications, lagging Microsoft, which has 17% of the $72 billion market in 2018, and Salesforce, which had 13%, according to Gartner. Oracle was third with 6%.

Oracle is wrestling with a problem faced by other traditional enterprise software companies, like rivals IBM and SAP. These companies have made money by selling lucrative long-term contracts for business software, in which sales reps earned generous commissions on each contract.

The cloud is changing that. 

Pioneer cloud software companies, such as Salesforce and Workday, embraced a system that lets businesses pay for software on a subscription basis, usually based on the number of users or the computing capacity they need or use. 

"Selling motions to the cloud shift away from large deals to more frequent smaller deals," analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research told Business Insider.

Sales organization revamp

For companies like Oracle, competing in the cloud era has meant revamping their sales organizations. That's why one of the changes Wang expects from Oracle is "a transformation of their sales and marketing teams."

In fact, Hurd had been Oracle's pointman in this transformation, and why his death was blow to the company, Walravens said. "He shifted that sales model pretty aggressively hiring a lot of people, you know, a lot of smart recent college graduates," he said.

Oracle has said it does not plan to appoint a new co-CEO but is looking to bring in new senior executives.

Wang speculated the Oracle is considering naming a new president, the post occupied by both Hurd and Catz before they were jointly promoted to CEO in 2014. 

Walravens has said that Oracle should consider three experienced and prominent executives from successful cloud software companies: Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta; Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign, the e-signature company; and Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa, the business spend management company.

"Someone needs to rise up, either from the inside the company or someone needs to be grown groomed from outside the company to build the next layer of leadership," he said. "I think a great example is Salesforce."

He was referring to the recent leadership change at Salesforce, an Oracle rival, where Brett Taylor, who had been CEO of the work collaboration app Quip which the company bought in 2016. The well-regarded Taylor, who joined the Salesforce leadership after the acquisition,  just got promoted to chief operating officer.

Primeau said he expects acquisitions to continue being part of Oracle's game plan for building a stronger presence saying, "I think Oracle is well positioned to take on strategic acquisitions."

Oracle is also gearing up for one of the biggest legal battles in tech in years.

The company is set to take on Google before the US Supreme Court over Oracle's claim that the search giant stole key code from its Java technology. Google rejects the charge, arguing that Oracle cannot copyright these types of code, known as application programming interfaces or APIs — a claim endorsed by other tech giants, including IBM and Microsoft.

Focus on alliances

But despite the high-profile legal brawl in which Oracle may find itself facing off with tech's other heavy hitters, the Redwood City, Calif. company is also expected to pursue what appeared to be a new strategy which became more evident last year: forging partnerships, including with one-time rivals.

In 2019, Oracle surprised many in the tech world by unveiling alliances with Microsoft, a major competitor, and VMware, an Oracle customer. 

Primeau of Syntax said Oracle's partnership moves will definitely be worth watching. "Will we see Oracle opening up some of their core solutions to other hyperscalers?" he said, referring to companies that run massive cloud data centers. Referring to Oracle's cloud-based database offering, he added, "Will we see autonomous database running on [Microsoft] Azure?"

VMware, which has emerged as a major player in the cloud, offers software that makes it easier for customers to migrate to and operate in the cloud. But for years, Oracle has resisted supporting its products.

VMware CIO Bask Iyer said he was "very pleasantly surprised" by the alliance with Oracle which he said made so much sense for both tech giants. "This is a big partner ecosystem and the more you're collaborating the better it is for your customers," he told Business Insider. "They need to do more of that and they need to do it quicker."

He noted Oracle's reputation as a hard-nosed vendor who can be "very tough with customers." But he said that appears to be changing.

"We need a kinder and gentler Oracle," he said, adding that collaboration has become critical in enterprise tech. "It's not world dominance. You need to have constant innovation. I would expect them to work with every cloud provider, every leading vendor. They have to coexist."

"We want them to be wildly successful," Iyer said. "I would want as a customer for them to be successful."

Got a tip about Oracle or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentelor send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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• Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison purchased 3 million Tesla shares for roughly $1 billion before he joined the automaker's board in December 2018, according to Bloomberg.
• Following Tesla's recent rally, that stake is worth $1.6 billion.
• Tesla has netted other investors big gains. Baillie Gifford's decision not to lower its Tesla stake meant clients had made profits on paper of $5 billion, The Times of London reported Monday.
• Watch Tesla trade live on Markets Insider.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Larry Ellison's big bet on Tesla is starting to pay off.

Ellison, the chairman and founder of Oracle, purchased 3 million Tesla shares for roughly $1 billion before he joined the automaker's board in December 2018, according to Bloomberg.

Bloomberg said that stake is now worth more than $1.6 billion after Tesla's epic rebound and a rally that's sent shares up as much as 25% in 2020 alone.

Ellison's investment didn't do so well for much of 2019. Shares of Tesla shed about 46% from the beginning of the year to a low of roughly $178 per share in June.

While shares traded up slightly from that low in the following months, they didn't make meaningful gains until October, when Tesla reported a surprise return to profitability in its third-quarter earnings. That sent shares soaring as much as 17% in after-hours trading following the earnings release and sparked the beginning of a rally.

Since October, Tesla's share price has doubled and broken several records, fueled by solid vehicle-delivery numbers for 2019 and optimism about the company's new Gigafactory in Shanghai. In January, Tesla officially became the highest-valued US automaker ever; shortly after, its market cap eclipsed that of Ford and General Motors combined.

Read more:A tech investor who crushed 97% of his peers in 2019 gives us his top 5 stock picks for the next 5 years

This week, Tesla surged to another milestone, breaking the $500-per-share threshold and ending Monday at a fresh high of $524.86.

Other investors have notably benefited from holding positions in Tesla. Baillie Gifford, Tesla's largest shareholder outside of Elon Musk, discussed reducing its 10% stake in the company amid its struggles in 2019, The Times of London reported Monday. But the Edinburgh-based fund-management group decided after an internal review that the case against Tesla was not strong enough to reduce its position.

It's paid off — Baillie Gifford clients made profits on paper of $5 billion because of the decision not to reduce the Tesla stake, The Times reported.

Tesla has gained roughly 25% year-to-date through Monday's close.

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• Tech executives like Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have found unusual ways to spend their billions. 
• Elon Musk bought the submarine car from "The Spy Who Loved Me," while Jeff Bezos dredged pieces of the Apollo 12 engine from the bottom of the Atlantic. 
• Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

If you're among the richest people in the world, chances are you've found some unusual ways to spend your money. 

That's what tech executives like Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have done, anyway — they've spent money on everything from a massive chunk of the state of Hawaii to the submarine car from the James Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me." 

Some tech billionaires are famously frugal, while others spend money on more conventional expenditures like mansions or fabulous vacations. And while the tech billionaires featured below own their fair share of homes and yachts — plus found time for more noble pursuits like donating to charity or signing the Giving Pledge— they've also used their billions to pursue passion projects.

Here are some of the more unusual and extravagant ways tech executives have spent their money. 

SEE ALSO: How billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk went from getting bullied as a child to becoming one of the most successful and provocative men in tech

Many CEOs make expensive home and land purchases, but perhaps none more so than Oracle founder Larry Ellison. In 2012, the billionaire purchased 98% of the Hawaiian island Lanai.

Ellison reportedly paid $300 million for the island in 2012. It contains 90,000 acres of land and several resorts, and is home to more than 3,200 residents. Ellison plans to use to land to test environmentally friendly practices like solar power and electric vehicles. 

Source: Forbes

Unsurprisingly, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has an interest in unusual vehicles. In 2013, for example, he bought the Lotus Esprit submarine car that's used in the James Bond movie "The Spy Who Loved Me." Musk paid $920,000 at auction.

"It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater," Musk said in a statement to Jalopnik at the time. "I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform. What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real."

Source: Jalopnik

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested $42 million in a mechanical clock that's buried inside a mountain in Texas.

The 10,000-year-clock, as it's called, was created by a group called The Long Now Foundation. It's a 500-foot-tall clock that's powered by thermal cycles and is designed to keep time for millennia.

Source: Business Insider

Bezos has a passion for space, as evidenced by his Blue Origin rocket company. In 2013, the exec also funded an expedition to retrieve the remains of multiple Apollo engines from the bottom of the ocean.

Bezos led a team that sent unmanned robots 14,000 feet down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off of Cape Canaveral, Florida, to gather the engine parts from the Apollo 12 moon mission. 

"To bring those pieces up on deck and actually touch them, that brought back for me all those feelings I had when I was 5 years old and watched those missions go to the moon," Bezos said in a video about the expedition, according to the Seattle Times. "If this results in one young explorer, one young adventurer, one young inventor, doing something amazing that helps the world, I'm totally fulfilled."

Source: Seattle Times

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has reportedly invested between $100 and $150 million of his own money in building a 600-foot flying airship.

Brin is said to be building the airship, which would be the world's largest aircraft, out of a NASA research center near Mountain View, California.

He reportedly envisions using it to make deliveries for humanitarian missions or as an "air yacht" for friends and family. 

Source: The Guardian

Brin's fellow Google cofounder Larry Page is also interested in flying vehicles, though of a slightly different variety: Page funds three different flying car startups.

Page has invested in a two-seater flying taxi called Cora and a flying boat called Flyer, which are both made by electric flight transportation company Kitty Hawk. He's also involved in Opener, a startup that makes a flying vehicle called BlackFly. 

It's not clear how much money Page has invested in these projects. 

Source: The Verge

And while many high-powered executives have private planes, Page and Brin one-upped the typical Gulfstream jet. In 2005, they bought a former passenger plane, a Boeing 767-200.

But in true Google fashion, Page and Brin tricked out the inside, adding a dining area, two staterooms with adjacent bathrooms, and multiple seating areas. The jet can hold up to 50 passengers and includes several first-class seats.

Meanwhile, Oracle's Larry Ellison owns a decommissioned Soviet jet fighter, the Mikoyan MiG-29.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

• Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 to start blood-testing startup Theranos, and grew the company to a valuation of $9 billion.
• But it all came crashing down when the shortcomings and inaccuracies of the company's technology were exposed, and Theranos and Holmes were charged with "massive fraud."
• A California judge has set a August 2020 start date for the federal fraud trial for which, if convicted, Holmes could face up to 20 years in prison.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In 2014, blood-testing startup Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, were on top of the world.

Back then, Theranos was a revolutionary idea thought up by a woman hailed as a genius who styled herself as a female Steve Jobs. Holmes was the world's youngest female self-made billionaire, and Theranos was one of Silicon Valley's unicorn startups, valued at an estimated $9 billion. 

But then it all came crashing down.

The shortcomings and inaccuracies of Theranos's technology were exposed, along with the role Holmes played in covering it all up. Holmes was ousted as CEO and charged with "massive fraud," and the company was forced to close its labs and testing centers, ultimately shuttering operations altogether. 

Now, Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. In the meantime, as she awaits trial, she's reportedly found the time to get engaged — and married — to a hotel heir named Billy Evans.

This is how Holmes went from precocious child, to ambitious Stanford dropout, to an embattled startup founder charged with fraud: 

SEE ALSO: Take a look inside the $5,000-a-month San Francisco apartment that Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reportedly once called home with her now-husband, Billy Evans

Elizabeth Holmes was born on February 3, 1984 in Washington, D.C. Her mom, Noel, was a Congressional committee staffer, and her dad, Christian Holmes, worked for Enron before moving to government agencies like USAID.

Source: Elizabeth Holmes/Twitter, CNN, Vanity Fair

Holmes' family moved when she was young, from Washington, D.C. to Houston.

Source: Fortune

When she was 7, Holmes tried to invent her own time machine, filling up an entire notebook with detailed engineering drawings. At the age of 9, Holmes told relatives she wanted to be a billionaire when she grew up. Her relatives described her as saying it with the "utmost seriousness and determination."

Source: CBS News, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Holmes had an "intense competitive streak" from a young age. She often played Monopoly with her younger brother and cousin, and she would insist on playing until the end, collecting the houses and hotels until she won. If Holmes was losing, she would often storm off. More than once, she ran directly through a screen on the door.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

It was during high school that Holmes developed her work ethic, often staying up late to study. She quickly became a straight-A student, and even started her own business: she sold C++ compilers, a type of software that translates computer code, to Chinese schools.

Source: Fortune, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Holmes started taking Mandarin lessons, and part-way through high school, talked her way into being accepted by Stanford University’s summer program, which culminated in a trip to Beijing.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Inspired by her great-great-grandfather Christian Holmes, a surgeon, Holmes decided she wanted to go into medicine. But she discovered early on that she was terrified of needles. Later, she said this influenced her to start Theranos.

Source: San Francisco Business Times

Holmes went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. When she was a freshman, she became a "president's scholar," an honor which came with a $3,000 stipend to go toward a research project.

Source: Fortune

Holmes spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute in Singapore. She got the job partly because she spoke Mandarin.

Source: Fortune

As a sophomore, Holmes went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and said: "Let's start a company." With his blessing, she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company's name to Theranos. Thanks to a typo, early employees’ paychecks actually said "Real-Time Curses."

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Holmes soon filed a patent application for "Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery," a wearable device that would administer medication, monitor patients' blood, and adjust the dosage as needed.

Source: Fortune, US Patent Office

By the next semester, Holmes had dropped out of Stanford altogether, and was working on Theranos in the basement of a college house.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Theranos's business model was based around the idea that it could run blood tests, using proprietary technology that required only a finger pinprick and a small amount of blood. Holmes said the tests would be able to detect medical conditions like cancer and high cholesterol.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Holmes started raising money for Theranos from prominent investors like Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend and the founder of prominent VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Theranos raised more than $700 million, and Draper has continued to defend Holmes.

Source: SEC, Crunchbase

Holmes took investors' money on the condition that she wouldn't have to reveal how Theranos' technology worked. Plus, she would have final say over everything having to do with the company.

Source: Vanity Fair

That obsession with secrecy extended to every aspect of Theranos. For the first decade Holmes spent building her company, Theranos operated in stealth mode. She even took three former Theranos employees to court, claiming they had misused Theranos trade secrets.

Source: San Francisco Business Times

Holmes' attitude toward secrecy and running a company was borrowed from a Silicon Valley hero of hers: former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Holmes started dressing in black turtlenecks like Jobs, decorated her office with his favorite furniture, and like Jobs, never took vacations.

Source: Vanity Fair

Even Holmes's uncharacteristically deep voice may have been part of a carefully crafted image intended to help her fit in in the male-dominated business world. In ABC's podcast on Holmes called "The Dropout," former Theranos employees said the CEO sometimes "fell out of character," particularly after drinking, and would speak in a higher voice.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, The Cut

Holmes was a demanding boss, and wanted her employees to work as hard as she did. She had her assistants track when employees arrived and left each day. To encourage people to work longer hours, she started having dinner catered to the office around 8 p.m. each night.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

More behind-the-scenes footage of what life was like at Theranos was revealed in leaked videos obtained by the team behind the HBO documentary "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley." The more than 100 hours of footage showed Holmes walking around the office, scenes from company parties, speeches from Holmes and Balwani, and Holmes dancing to "U Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer.

Source: Business Insider

Shortly after Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19, she began dating Theranos president and COO Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years her senior. The two met during Holmes' third year in Stanford’s summer Mandarin program, the summer before she went to college. She was bullied by some of the other students, and Balwani had come to her aid.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Balwani became Holmes' No. 2 at Theranos despite having little experience. He was said to be a bully, and often tracked his employees' whereabouts. Holmes and Balwani eventually broke up in spring 2016 when Holmes pushed him out of the company.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

In 2008, the Theranos board decided to remove Holmes as CEO in favor of someone more experienced. But over the course of a two-hour meeting, Holmes convinced them to let her stay in charge of her company.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

As Theranos started to rake in millions of funding, Holmes became the subject of media attention and acclaim in the tech world. She graced the covers of Fortune and Forbes, gave a TED Talk, and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibaba's Jack Ma.

Source: Vanity Fair

Theranos quickly began securing outside partnerships. Capital Blue Cross and Cleveland Clinic signed on to offer Theranos tests to their patients, and Walgreens made a deal to open Theranos testing centers in their stores. Theranos also formed a secret partnership with Safeway worth $350 million.

Source: Wired, Business Insider

In 2011, Holmes hired her younger brother, Christian, to work at Theranos, although he didn’t have a medical or science background. Christian Holmes spent his early days at Theranos reading about sports online and recruiting his Duke University fraternity brothers to join the company. People dubbed Holmes and his crew the "Frat Pack" and "Therabros."

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

At one point, Holmes was the world's youngest self-made female billionaire with a net worth of around $4.5 billion.

Source: Forbes

Holmes was obsessed with security at Theranos. She asked anyone who visited the company’s headquarters to sign non-disclosure agreements before being allowed in the building, and had security guards escort visitors everywhere — even to the bathroom.

Holmes hired bodyguards to drive her around in a black Audi sedan. Her nickname was "Eagle One." The windows in her office had bulletproof glass.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Around the same time, questions were being raised about Theranos' technology. Ian Gibbons — chief scientist at Theranos and one of the company's first hires — warned Holmes that the tests weren't ready for the public to take, and that there were inaccuracies in the technology. Outside scientists began voicing their concerns about Theranos, too.

Source: Vanity Fair, Business Insider

By August 2015, the FDA began investigating Theranos, and regulators from the government body that oversees laboratories found "major inaccuracies" in the testing Theranos was doing on patients.

Source: Vanity Fair

By October 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published his investigation into Theranos's struggles with its technology. Carreyrou's reporting sparked the beginning of the company's downward spiral.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Carreyrou found that Theranos' blood-testing machine, named Edison, couldn't give accurate results, so Theranos was running its samples through the same machines used by traditional blood-testing companies.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Holmes appeared on CNBC's "Mad Money" shortly after the WSJ published its story to defend herself and Theranos. "This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world," Holmes said.

Source: CNBC

By 2016, the FDA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and SEC were all looking into Theranos.

Source: Wall Street Journal,Wired

In July 2016, Holmes was banned from the lab-testing industry for two years. By October, Theranos had shut down its lab operations and wellness centers.

Source: Business Insider

In March 2018, Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani were charged with "massive fraud" by the SEC. Holmes agreed to give up financial and voting control of the company, pay a $500,000 fine, and return 18.9 million shares of Theranos stock. She also isn't allowed to be the director or officer of a publicly traded company for 10 years.

Source: Business Insider

Despite the charges, Holmes was allowed to stay on as CEO of Theranos, since it's a private company. The company had been hanging on by a thread, and Holmes wrote to investors asking for more money to save Theranos. "In light of where we are, this is no easy ask," Holmes wrote.

Source: Business Insider

In Theranos' final days, Holmes reportedly got a Siberian husky puppy named Balto that she brought into the office. However, the dog wasn't potty trained, and would go to the bathroom inside the company's office and during meetings.

Source: Vanity Fair

In June 2018, Theranos announced that Holmes was stepping down as CEO. On the same day, the Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had charged Holmes, along with Balwani, with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Source: Business Insider, CNBC

Theranos sent an email to shareholders in September 2018 announcing that the company was shutting down. Theranos reportedly said it planned to spend the next few months repaying creditors with its remaining resources.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Around the time Theranos' time was coming to an end, Holmes made her first public appearance alongside William "Billy" Evans, a 27-year-old heir to a hospitality property management company in California. The two reportedly first met in 2017, and were seen together in 2018 at Burning Man, the art festival in the Nevada desert.

Source: Daily Mail

Holmes is said to wear Evans' MIT "signet ring" on a chain around her neck, and the couple reportedly posts photos "professing their love for each other" on a private Instagram account. Evans' parents are reportedly "flabbergasted" at their son's decision to marry Holmes.

Tweet Embed:
//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1098642159085834240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
For everyone asking about Holmes's social media. It's private. But here are a few screenshots of her and her fiancé we found online. (I personally find it crazy that she's being charged with 11 felony counts, thousands of people's lives were harmed, and she's as happy as can be.) pic.twitter.com/6nYfjltLt4

Source: Vanity Fair, New York Post

It's unclear where Holmes and Evans currently reside, but they were previously living in a $5,000-a-month apartment in San Francisco until April 2019. The apartment was located just a few blocks from one of the city's top tourist attractions, the famously crooked block of Lombard Street.

Source: Business Insider

It was later reported that Holmes and Evans got engaged in early 2019, then married in June in a secretive wedding ceremony. Former Theranos employees were reportedly not invited to the wedding, according to Vanity Fair.

Source: Vanity Fair, New York Post

Holmes, as well as Balwani, will see their day in court sometime this year. A California judge ruled that the federal trial for Holmes and Balwani is set to start in August 2020.

Source: Business Insider

If convicted, both Holmes and Balwani could face up to 20 years in prison and a more than $2.7 million fine, the US government has said.

Source: Department of Justice

Besides the criminal case, Holmes is also involved in a number of civil lawsuits, including one in Arizona brought on by former Theranos patients over inaccurate blood tests. The lawyers representing her in the Arizona case said in late 2019 they hadn't been paid over a year, and asked to be removed from Holmes' legal team.

Source: Business Insider

Maya Kosoff contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

• Tesla on Thursday announced plans to offer $2 billion of common stock.
• Shares of the automaker fell as much as 7% in early trading Thursday.
• Tesla said it would use the proceeds to "further strengthen its balance sheet, as well as for general corporate purposes."
• On a call with analysts 15 days ago, CEO Elon Musk said Tesla wouldn't raise further capital.
• Watch Tesla trade live on Markets Insider.
• Read more on Business Insider.

Shares of Tesla fell as much as 7% in early trading Thursday after the automaker announced plans to offer $2 billion of common stock. The shares rebounded after the start of regular trading, erasing the early loss.

The company "intends to use the net proceeds from the offering to further strengthen its balance sheet, as well as for general corporate purposes,"Tesla said in a press release. In the offering, CEO Elon Musk will purchase up to $10 million of common stock, and Larry Ellison, a Tesla board member and longtime investor, will buy as much as $1 million, Tesla said.

Musk said on Tesla's fourth-quarter earnings call on January 29 that the company would not raise further capital.

"We're spending money, I think, efficiently, and we're not artificially limiting our progress," Musk said. "And then despite all that, we are still generating positive cash."

He continued: "So in light of that, it doesn't make sense to raise money, because we expect to generate cash despite this growth level."

Releasing new common stock can have a negative effect on share price and damage the sentiment of original investors. When a company offers more stock to raise capital, as Tesla has, future earnings per share could take a hit, as any earnings brought in by the company have to be spread among a greater number of shares.

And having more common stock dilutes the ownership of investors who held stakes in the company before the offering, which might not sit well with Tesla's original investors.

To convince investors that the additional offering is worth it, Tesla has to have a solid plan for the extra capital and explain how it will generate earnings for the company and shareholders.

Tesla has been on a torrid rally that's sent shares up as much as 250% from October, when the company announced a surprise return to profitability in the third quarter, to the stock's highest close on February 4.

Tesla stock has gained roughly 83% year-to-date through Wednesday's close.

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• Billionaire Oracle chairman Larry Ellison will host a fundraiser for President Donald Trump's reelection campaign, The Desert Sun's Sam Metz reported Wednesday.
• Tickets for the event, which will be held on Ellison's estate in Rancho Mirage, California, cost up to $250,000, according to The Desert Sun.
• Billionaires from other industries including Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus and real-estate developer Stephen Ross faced public outrage and boycotts of their companies in 2019, following reports of their donations to the president.
• Ellison — the fifth-richest person in the United States, per Forbes — is worth $69.1 billion.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Billionaire Oracle chairman Larry Ellison is slated to host a fundraiser for President Donald Trump.

The fundraiser will be held on February 19 at Ellison's estate in Rancho Mirage, California, according to a copy of an invitation seen by The Desert Sun reporter Sam Metz. For $100,000, Trump's supporters will get to play golf with the president and pose for a photo with him, The Desert Sun reported. For $250,000, donors will get to take part in a round table discussion with the president in addition to the golf outing and photoshoot. The event's invitation states that the proceeds will be used to support the Republican National Convention and state GOP chapters, in addition to funding Trump's reelection bid.

A representative for Ellison at Oracle declined Business Insider's request for comment on the fundraiser or Ellison's political beliefs.

Ellison's show of support for the president comes as anti-billionaire sentiment is increasingly widespread among Democrats. Left-wing Democrats Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have both been outspoken in their criticism of America's wealthiest people and Buttigieg's apparent solicitousness of them. Warren sells "billionaire tears" mugs and hosts a wealth tax calculator on her campaign website, which also takes thinly-veiled swipes at Bill Gates and Leon Cooperman. And her tough rhetoric has instilled fear in many billionaires, former Goldman Sachs partner and hedge-fund manager Michael Novogratz told Bloomberg.

Ellison's public display of support for Trump is rare among Silicon Valley billionaires, but not unprecedented

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel publicly backed Trump before the election, even taking the stage at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, Business Insider reported at the time.

Billionaires from other industries, including Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus and real-estate developer Stephen Ross, faced public outrage and boycotts of their companies in 2019, following reports of their donations to the president.

Several of Ellison's peers donated to former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg received campaign donations from 40 billionaires or their spouses, including the wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, and hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman. Buttigieg has repeatably come under fire for his billionaire backers, most notably from fellow primary frontrunner Sanders.

Ellison built a multibillion-dollar fortune after founding software giant Oracle, Business Insider previously reported. Ellison stepped down as Oracle's chief executive in 2014 but remains the company's chairman. He also holds a seat on Tesla's board of directors, and a reputation as an international playboy. Ellison is the fifth-richest man in the country, with a net worth $69.1 billion, Forbes estimates.

At least $9.5 million of Ellison's fortune has gone to federal political candidates and political action committees since 1993, a review of Federal Election Commission documents by The Desert Sun found. Ellison supported Sen. Marco Rubio over Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, but seems to have since thrown his weight behind the president.

SEE ALSO: Mayor Pete's awkward embrace of billionaires isn't a moral disagreement with Bernie Sanders, it's a campaign strategy

DON'T MISS: The top 25 Americans who funded politics in 2018

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• Oracle employees are protesting founder Larry Ellison's plan to host a fundraising dinner for President Trump at his Southern California home next week. 
• Some employees are circulating a petition that calls on the Oracle leadership to take a stand against what they call Ellison's "damaging association with the Trump campaign."
• "His alliance with this ignoble and destructive figure damages our company culture as well as our relationships with partners and customers," the petition said.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Larry Ellison's planned fundraising dinner for President Donald Trump has triggered a minirebellion at Oracle, where some employees are blasting the tech titan's "alliance with this ignoble and destructive figure."

A group of employees is circulating a petition that calls on the Oracle leadership to take a stand against what they call Ellison's "damaging association with the Trump campaign." The petition is also calling for Ellison to cancel the event.

"His alliance with this ignoble and destructive figure damages our company culture as well as our relationships with partners and customers," the petition, which was first reported by Vox, said.

"Ellison's financial support of Donald Trump endangers the well-being of women, immigrants, communities of color, the environment, LGBTQ and trans communities, disabled people, and workers everywhere," the petition added.

Oracle could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ellison is planning the fundraising event for Trump at his estate in Rancho Mirage, California, Desert Sun reported. Oracle CEO Safra Catz is also a known Trump supporter and was part of his transition team after the 2016 elections. 

That prompted the Oracle employee George Polisner to resign.

"Trump stokes fear, hatred, and violence toward people of color, Muslims, and immigrants. It is well-known that hate crimes are surging as he has provided license for this ignorance-based expression of malice," he said.

Got a tip about Oracle or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentel, or send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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• Oracle employees are planning to "log off" and walk off their jobs in reaction to founder Larry Ellison's planned fundraising dinner for President Trump.
• The Oracle founder is planning to host the event on Wednesday, which has triggered a small rebellion at the tech giant. 
• The campaign, dubbed "No Ethics / No Work" calls on Oracle employees to "log off at noon local time to spend time volunteering or donating to programs and efforts that aim to resist administration policies that go against Oracle's Code of Conduct and Ethics policies."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Some Oracle employees are planning to log off and walk off the job on Thursday, in reaction to founder Larry Ellison's decision to hold fundraising dinner for President Trump.

Ellison is holding the event for Trump at his estate in Rancho Mirage, California on Wednesday. News of the fundraiser triggered a small rebellion at the Silicon Valley company.

Organizers of the protest, dubbed "No Ethics/No Work," said they are asking "all employees log off at noon local time to spend time volunteering or donating to programs and efforts that aim to resist administration policies that go against Oracle's Code of Conduct and Ethics policies."

"We are Oracle employees disappointed that Oracle Founder and CTO Larry Ellison's support of and planned fundraiser for Donald Trump does not affirm Oracle's core values of diversity, inclusiveness, and ethical business conduct," the group said.

The organizers also said: "If you don't feel comfortable logging off, that's okay. You can still participate and we will be sharing additional details in our dedicated #OracleEmployeesforEthics Slack channel."

Oracle declined to comment.

Got a tip about Oracle or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentelor send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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• Rafael Soto-Marquez is an Oracle software engineer and one of the employees protesting founder Larry Ellison's fundraising dinner for President Trump.
• He is a also an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the US when he was three.  He's been able to stay legally through DACA, the program meant to help children of undocumented immigrants, which the Trump administration wants to end.

• "It was kind of a blow to the stomach," he told Business Insider. "I was pretty upset about Larry's position. His name is pretty much synonymous with Oracle. I think that it really puts, you know, just such a bad label on the company itself."

• "I think it's important for people like me to speak up even if their position is on the line," he also said. "If Larry Ellison is free to voice his political opinion and promote someone who has really just terrible core values and is a threat to America, then I think that I should be free to tell my own story."

• One of the Oracle protest organizers, Monica McClurem, told Business Insider: "We felt compelled to speak out in dissent. We want to combat the perception of Oracle as a passive, defeated workforce."

• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Rafael Soto-Marquez is one of the Oracle employees protesting Larry Ellison's planned fundraiser for President Donald Trump.

Soto-Marquez is supporting the protests launched by some Oracle employees who have called for a "log-off" protest against Ellison's planned Trump fundraiser, where they will leave work at noon local time on Thursday to "spend time volunteering or donating to programs and efforts that aim to resist administration policies that go against Oracle's Code of Conduct and Ethics policies."

For the 27-year-old software engineer, joining this act of rebellion is personal. Soto is a "dreamer," an undocumented immigrant appalled by Ellison's embrace of a president known for comments about immigrants that have been called offensive and even racist. 

"It was kind of a blow to the stomach," Soto-Marquez told Business Insider. "I was pretty upset about Larry's position. His name is pretty much synonymous with Oracle. I think that it really puts, you know, just such a bad label on the company itself."

Trump is known for what many consider offensive, even racist, views against immigrants, once suggesting that most Mexicans are rapists. 

"It's seeing someone like Larry who's supposed to lead the company and really put forth an example for everyone having such close ties with someone like Donald Trump," Soto-Marquez said. 

Oracle declined to comment for this story.

'You don't really know'

Soto-Marquez's parents brought him to the US from Mexico when he was three. 

"My dad worked as a laborer and my mom cleaned houses," he said. "They were very poor in Mexico…I didn't actually find out I was undocumented, I think, probably till I was 12. And at that point you don't really know...what it means."

Being undocumented meant a life of uncertainty as he was growing up. DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, program changed that by allowing children of undocumented immigrants to be eligible to work and build a life in the US where they grew up.

DACA paved the way to a tech career for Soto-Marquez. He grew up in the Chicago area and earned a physics degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He worked as a research assistant and specialist before joining Oracle as an engineer five years ago.

He was planning to renew his DACA status this year. But the Trump administration has been trying to end the program, and the issue is now before the US Supreme Court.

'My family very much depends on my financial stability'

Soto-Marquez said he's aware that joining the Oracle protest and speaking out against Trump and Ellison is dangerous and could mean his job. 

"I have to worry pretty much constantly about DACA, whether I'm going to be allowed to work," he said. "And honestly, my family very much depends on my financial stability."

But he can't keep silent, he said.

"I think it's important for people like me to speak up even if their position is on the line," he said. "My whole life I've been told, keep your head down, listen to those into those above you and don't really rock the boat."

"If Larry Ellison is free to voice his political opinion and promote someone who has really just terrible core values and is a threat to America," Soto-Marquez said, "then I think that I should be free to tell my own story."

The protest

He said other Oracle employees are joining the protest for many other reasons. "I've really been moved by some of the conversations people were having."

One of the protest leaders is Kiely Sweatt, director of innovation at Oracle's applications consulting organization for North America.

This is "about ethics and morals," she told Business insider. 

"Some people might be too scared to speak up," she said. "I'd take that risk to do it on their behalf even if it meant losing my job. When you work for a business that supports a dictator I'd imagine one questioning the health of that business and overall culture of well-being and inclusiveness of its employees at large."

Another protest organizer, Monica McClurem, a senior copywriter, said she was "disgusted but not surprised" when she learned about the Trump fundraiser. 

"Oracle and Larry Ellison have a history of privileging profit over people," she told Business Insider. "We felt compelled to speak out in dissent. We want to combat the perception of Oracle as a passive, defeated workforce."

Got a tip about Oracle or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentelor send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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• Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block is stepping down, leaving Marc Benioff as the cloud software giant's sole chief executive.
• Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years before leaving the company to work on Salesforce full time.
• Benioff has a net worth of $7.85 billion, Bloomberg estimates.
• Benioff got his first job at a jewelry store to save up for his first computer, but he was eventually fired for cleaning the floors with the wrong soap.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Marc Benioff is now Salesforce's sole chief executive. 

The cloud software giant announced Tuesday alongside its fourth-quarter earnings that Benioff's co-CEO, Keith Block, has stepped down after a year and a half. In the statement, Block did not give a reason for the transition but said he was excited for the future.

Salesforce itself is in a good position at the moment: Under Benioff's leadership, the company has swelled to a $160 billion market cap, even as it hit $10 billion in annual revenue for the 2018 fiscal year. It's gone from an upstart Oracle rival to a cloud computing behemoth in its own right.

Here's how Benioff, whose estimated net worth now stands at $7.85 billion, worked his way up to the national stage from humble origins.

SEE ALSO: Edit in Viking Billionaire Marc Benioff is asking for higher taxes on America's wealthiest people — and he's just the latest in the chorus of ultra-wealthy people with the same demand

DON'T MISS: Take a look inside the gala Marc Benioff hosted for USC, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed, James Corden emceed, and billionaires dined with Ashton Kutcher

Marc Russell Benioff, 55, was born in San Francisco on September 25th, 1964, the son of Joelle and Russell Benioff.

Source: Bloomberg

Benioff is something of an anomaly among Silicon Valley CEOs — he was actually born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated from Burlingame High School in 1982.

Source: Bloomberg

His father, Russell Benioff, owned a local department store in San Francisco. "I learned my work ethic from him," Benioff once said.

Source: Inc.

Benioff got his first job at a jewelry store to save up for his first computer. He was eventually fired for cleaning the floors with the wrong soap.

Source: Entrepreneur

While in high school, Benioff sold his first app — software called "How To Juggle" for the TRS-80 Model 1 computer — to a computer magazine for $75.

Source: Entrepreneur

At age 15, Benioff founded Liberty Software, his one-man company making games for the Atari 800 computer. Titles included "King Arthur's Heir,""The Nightmare,""Escape from Vulcan's Isle," and "Crypt of the Undead."

Source: Entrepreneur

By age 16, Benioff was pulling in $1,500 a month — enough that he was able to pay for his own tuition at the University of Southern California. He graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration in 1986.

Source: Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to billion-dollar company and revolutionized an industry, Salesforce

USC named Benioff an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2014. He now sits on the University's Board of Trustees.

Source: Salesforce

While at USC, Benioff took a summer internship with Apple, working as a programmer in the Macintosh division under cofounder Steve Jobs. "That summer, I discovered it was possible for an entrepreneur to encourage revolutionary ideas," Benioff would later write.

Source: Entrepreneur

Jobs became one of Benioff's mentors. “There would be no Salesforce.com without Steve Jobs,” Benioff said in 2013.

Source: Entrepreneur

Benioff planned to stay in programming for the rest of his career, but a USC professor suggested he might have a mind for business. And so, he took a customer support role at high-flying database company Oracle right out of college.

Source: Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to billion-dollar company and revolutionized an industry

Young Benioff rapidly made it up the ranks. At age 23, Benioff was named Oracle's "Rookie of the Year."

Source: Entrepreneur

At 25, Benioff's salary from Oracle made him a millionaire.

Source: Vanity Fair

By age 26, he was named a vice president — the youngest person to attain the role in the company's history.

Source: Entrepreneur

While at Oracle, Benioff caught the attention of its billionaire playboy founder Larry Ellison. The two became very close, with Ellison mentoring the younger Benioff.

Source: Inc.

Carlye Adler wrote in Fortune: “They sailed to the Mediterranean on Ellison's yacht, visited Japan during cherry blossom season, spent Thanksgiving together, and even double-dated.”

Source: Fortune

After 13 years with Oracle, Benioff started itching for something new. With Ellison's permission, Benioff took a sabbatical to travel the world. He spent part of that time studying meditation in Hawaii.

Source: Entrepreneur

Benioff came up with the idea for Salesforce while swimming with dolphins. He soon started working on the company with a few other Oracle veterans.

Source: Entrepreneur

The big idea behind Salesforce was that where most companies — including Oracle — sold enterprise software that companies had to install on their own servers, they would let people access business apps from the web browser. For the late nineties, this was revolutionary.

Source: Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to billion-dollar company and revolutionized an industry

At first, Ellison was supportive of Benioff. Ellison even gave Salesforce $2 million in funding from his own pocket to get it started, and sat on its board of directors.

Source: Business Insider

But things turned sour between the two. Benioff found out that Oracle was working on a direct competitor to Salesforce. Benioff tried to force his mentor to quit the company's board. Instead, Ellison forced Benioff to fire him — meaning Ellison kept his shares in Salesforce.

Source: Business Insider

Read more: The epic 30-year bromance of billionaire CEOs Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff

It kicked off an epic rivalry for the ages, with the two taking shots at each other in the press. Note the Salesforce jet shooting down the Oracle biplane in this early Salesforce ad from 2001.

Source: Business Insider

The dot-com bust of the early 2000s was a difficult time for Salesforce. "Suddenly everything around us was falling apart," Benioff's cofounder Parker Harris said.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Salesforce survived and kept growing, becoming one of the earliest and biggest companies in the modern cloud computing market.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

And in June 2004, Salesforce held its IPO, raising $110 million at $11 per share.

Source: Bloomberg

In addition to Ellison, real estate magnate Paul Pelosi — the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the US Speaker for the House of Representatives — was an early investor in Salesforce, making them both a lot of money.

Source: Inc.

Beyond just business, Benioff is a best-selling author of the business book "Behind the Cloud," a 2009 memoir on Salesforce's early success.

Source: Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to billion-dollar company and revolutionized an industry

Benioff is also a big believer in corporate philanthropy: Under his leadership, Salesforce invented the "1-1-1" model, where the company gives 1% of employee time as volunteer hours, 1% of its profits, and 1% of its resources to charitable causes.

Source: Salesforce

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee declared March 7 "Global 1/1/1 Day" in honor of Salesforce's 15th birthday in 2014. Benioff keeps a copy of the proclamation in his office.

Source: Forbes

Benioff's philanthropic efforts focus on children’s health, the environment, public education, and homelessness, according to his biography on Salesforce's website.

Source: Salesforce

"I hope that our city leaders will wake up & realize that Homelessness is our #1 crisis," Benioff tweeted in July 2019.

Source: Twitter

Benioff donated $250 million to the University of California, San Francisco in 2010 to found UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals.

Source: Salesforce

In 2016, Benioff and his wife, Lynne, launched the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara to study marine life.

Source: Salesforce

"The business of business is improving the state of the world," Benioff said.

Source: Salesforce

Benioff also serves on the World Economic Forum's Board of Trustees.

Source: Salesforce

Benioff credits former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Hindu guru Mata Amritanandamayi — who he met on a trip through India — with encouraging him to put Salesforce's resources to work helping others.

Source: Inc.

Benioff's belief in social justice also led him straight into the fight against proposed bills in Indiana and Georgia that would allow discrimination against gay people. He rallied other business leaders to the cause, with a positive result.

All the while, he's earned a reputation as one of Silicon Valley's most boisterous CEOs. He rarely appears in public without his custom cloud sneakers.

Source: Business Insider

Benioff is also a Star Wars fan. He keeps an R2-D2 figurine on his desk.

Source: Forbes

And while he may not be the globetrotting playboy that his mentor Ellison is, Benioff has lots of friends in the celebrity and political worlds.

Benioff is married to philanthropist Lynne Benioff.

Source: Salesforce

The Benioffs have several homes, including this 5-acre compound in Hawaii.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

He also has fractional ownership of two Gulfstream IV jets.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

All the while, Salesforce has grown to a $160 billion company, while its annual Dreamforce conference has ballooned to take over much of San Francisco every autumn.

Source: Business Insider 1, 2

Dreamforce is also always a huge party, with acts like Metallica and Foo Fighters headlining its afterparties.

Source: Business Insider

Salesforce has gotten so big, that at one point, the company had to abandon plans to move into a new San Francisco campus, because it had already outgrown it. Instead, it opened Salesforce Tower, its new headquarters — and the tallest building in San Francisco — in 2018.

Source: Business Insider

Oh, and yes, Marc Benioff is distantly related to David Benioff, of "Game of Thrones" fame.

Source: Business Insider

In August 2018, Salesforce named one-time Oracle exec Keith Block the company's co-CEO, putting him on an even keel with Benioff. Block stepped down a year-and-a-half later.

Source: Business Insider

In 2018, Marc and his wife Lynne Benioff announced that they intend to purchase Time Magazine for $190 million.

Source: Business Insider

In 2018, Salesforce paid Benioff a $1.5 million salary, in addition to a $2.3 million bonus for the fiscal year 2019 and 195,872 stock options.

Source: Business Insider

Benioff thinks he should pay more taxes on that money, however. "Well get an economy that works for everyone when 1) create educational system that works for everyone & 2) Affordable Higher education & 3) strengthen our local K-12 public schools 4) We must focus online reskilling that brings everyone along & 5) higher ind & Crp taxes to pay for it," Benioff tweeted in June 2019.

Source: Business Insider

• Billionaires can afford toys that most people can only dream of: private planes, penthouse apartments, and even entire islands.
• While some tech executives like Amazon's Jeff Bezos prefer partying on the yachts of their rich friends, others have purchased their own ritzy yachts complete with movie theaters and dance floors.
• Here are some of the tech elites who own private yachts.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Some billionaires, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, buy private planes to take control of the open skies — others purchase yachts to access the open seas.

There aren't too many tech billionaires who own personal yachts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for instance, doesn't have a yacht himself, but that doesn't stop him from cruising the ocean: He was pictured recently aboard the superyacht belonging to entertainment mogul David Geffen.

But the tech billionaires who do have yachts, like Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, reflect the view that yachts are for play: Their boats are decked out with amenities like gyms, spas, pools, nightclubs, and movie theaters.

If you want to find out what life is like aboard these multi-million-dollar yachts, some of them are available to rent out for a few nights or weeks at a time. For instance, chartering the yacht owned by Alphabet President Sergey Brin has cost past customers $773,000 a week.

Take a look at some of the yachts owned by tech billionaires:

SEE ALSO: A day with YouTube prankster Adam Saleh proved that the internet's A-listers have reached celebrity status

Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison owns a 288-foot yacht named Musashi that he acquired in 2013.

Source: Forbes

Ellison also has a knack for competitive yacht racing, and helped to found and back a racing team, called Oracle Team USA, in 2000. The team has found success and won several prestigious titles over the years.

Source: Telegraph

Ellison previously owned a bigger, 454-foot yacht called Rising Sun, which was designed specifically for the CEO in 2005. That yacht reportedly has 82 rooms, a movie theater, a wine cellar, and a basketball court. However, Ellison sold off the Rising Sun to music mogul David Geffen for a reported $300 million.

Source: Forbes, Boat International

Ellison's boat, Musashi, is a sister ship to the yacht of another billionaire, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert. However, the yacht, named Fountainhead, is often mistaken for belonging to billionaire investor Mark Cuban. "The guy who owns the boat tells everyone that it's mine," Cuban told Page Six in 2016. "It's so crazy ... I don't even own a boat."

Source: Page Six

Ellison's yacht reportedly influenced the decision of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs to get a boat himself. However, Jobs never set foot on the boat — the yacht was commissioned in 2008, but wasn't completed until 2012, a year after his death.

Source: Business Insider

When Jobs died in 2011, his yacht — along with his $14.1 billion fortune — was inherited by his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of a social-impact nonprofit called the Emerson Collective. The 256-foot yacht in named Venus, and is worth $130 million.

Source: Business Insider

Google's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are two of the richest people in the world, at No. 10 and No. 14, respectively. The two billionaires are known to splurge: In addition to each owning a superyacht, they both own private planes as well.

Sources: Forbes, Business Insider

Page owns a yacht named Senses, a $45 million 194-foot boat that he bought in 2011 from a New Zealand businessman. The yacht has a private beach club with a Jacuzzi and sun beds, both indoor and outdoor dining areas, and a helicopter pad.

Source: Boat International

Meanwhile, Brin owns a longer, 240-foot yacht that he bought for a cool $80 million in 2011. It's reportedly the world's fastest superyacht, and is equipped with a dance floor and open-air movie theater.

Source: Business Insider

Brin's yacht is named Dragonfly. The boat shares a name with Google's once-secret project to launch a censored search engine in China. Google said in 2019 it had officially terminated the project.

Source: Business Insider, Forbes

But Brin and Page aren't the only two high-powered Google figures with yachts. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns a 194-foot yacht name Oasis. The yacht reportedly features a pool and a gym-turned-nightclub. He bought the boat in 2009 for a reported $72.3 million.

Sources: Business Insider, GQ

For Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom, his interest in yachts skews toward racing and competitive sailing. Zennstrom has gone through a succession of boats all named Ran, and his most recent purchase is the seventh in the series.

Source: CNN

The latest yacht, appropriately named Ran VII, is the most technologically advanced of all of Zennstrom's boats. The racing yacht uses electrical power, which Zennstrom says makes it "lighter, less drag, quieter, and most importantly it is environmentally friendly."

Source: CNN

The 40-foot yacht will compete in regattas through the racing team owned by Zennstrom and his wife, Catherine. The Ran racing team launched in 2008, and has won some prestigious regattas.

Source: CNN

Barry Diller, chairman of digital media company IAC, co-owns a $70 million yacht with his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.

Source: Business Insider

The sailing yacht, named Eos, is 350 feet long with six bedrooms. The power couple has hosted many celebrities over the years — a few that have been spotted aboard Eos include model Karlie Kloss, actor Bradley Cooper, journalist Anderson Cooper, and singer Harry Styles.

Source: W Magazine

For Jim Clark, the cofounder of Netscape, one yacht hasn't been enough. Clark has owned boats for more than 30 years, and in 2012, he put up two of his sailing yachts for sale.

Source: Business Insider

Clark listed the boats for a combined $113 million: the 136-foot Hanuman for $18 million, and the 295-foot Athena for $95 million. However, as of 2016, Clark had yet to offload Athena. Clark also previously owned a 155-foot yacht named Hyperion, and currently also owns a racing yacht named Comanche.

Source: Boat International

Charles Simonyi worked at Microsoft until 2002, and oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office software. A few years before he left, Simonyi decided to purchase a yacht. He told the designer that wanted his yacht to be "home away from [his] home in Seattle."

Source: Boat International

The product of that conversation in 1999 is Simonyi's yacht named Skat, meaning "treasure" in Danish. The yacht measures 233 feet long, and is unique with its nontraditional design and gray color. Skat features a matching gray helicopter, a gym, and motorcycles.

Source: Yacht Charter Fleet

Opulent British billionaire Richard Branson owned a yacht, until he sold it in September 2018. The 105-foot catamaran sold for $3 million, significantly lower than the $9.6 million price Branson listed the boat for in 2014.

Source: Business Insider

Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, bought the boat in 2009. He named it Necker Belle, a nod to his private Caribbean island, Necker Island.

Source: Business Insider

• Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, and the two Google cofounders were all already millionaires before they turned 30.
• Although those tech founders saw massive success from their first companies, other major tech players didn't find wealth and fame until their second or third attempts at launching ventures.
• These are the ages of 23 tech founders when they started their first companies.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

For tech founders like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, it took a couple attempts to start the company that would turn them into industry visionaries and make them worth billions of dollars.

The founders of Tesla and Twitter, respectively, experienced only minor successes with their first tech ventures at a young age. It took them, and others, a couple of tries before landing on ideas that caught fire and became big names in the tech industry.

Although it's often the stories of young college dropouts like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that get the most attention, not all heads of tech companies found success at such a young age. While many big names in tech have already earned their first million in their 20s, others like Oracle founder Larry Ellison didn't come into their wealth until their 30s or later.

These are the ages that 23 of the most successful tech founders launched their first companies at:

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Tesla founder Elon Musk — Age 24

Year: 1995

Musk and his brother, Kimbal, founded Zip2 (originally Global Link Information Network), a company that provided online city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. The company was bought four years later by the computer company Compaq. 

Musk later went on to help found a number of companies, including X.com (that merged with PayPal), and the companies where he now serves as CEO: Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company.

Sources: Rolling Stone, New York Times

Dell founder Michael Dell — Age 21

Year: 1984

Michael Dell started Dell Technologies from his dorm room as a freshman at the University of Texas in Austin. What started as a side hustle of re-vamping computers for a profit turned into a full-time gig that allowed him to convince his parents he could drop out of college.

Source: CNBC

TheSkimm founders Danielle Weisberg & Carly Zakin — Ages 25 and 26

Year: 2012

Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin first met while studying abroad in Rome — Weisberg was a Tufts student, and Zakin attended UPenn. After graduating, they both found themselves working at NBC News in New York, and became roommates.

They left their roles in 2012 after realizing how many of their friends "weren't living and breathing the news like we were." They launched their daily, conversational aggregated news digest theSkimm, and now have more than 7 million subscribers.

Source: Business Insider, The Cut

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — Age 19

Year: 2004

Zuckerberg launched Facebook, as "Thefacebook," from his dorm room in 2004 as a sophomore at Harvard University. He dropped out later that year in order to devote his time fully to developing the social network.

Source: Business Insider

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar — Age 23

Year: 1991

A few years after graduating from Tufts University, Omidyar cofounded a pen-based computing company called Ink Development with friends. The company was later rebranded as an internet shopping software company called eShop, which Microsoft bought it in 1996 for $50 million. Before that sale was even finalized, Omidyar launched eBay in 1995.

Source: Entrepreneur, CNET

Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso — Age 22

Year: 2006

Before she started selling vintage clothes online, Amoruso was unemployed and hitchhiking up and down the West Coast. She landed at a building security job at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2006, and sold clothing on eBay in her spare time.

After getting kicked off eBay in 2008, she turned her passion for flipping vintage clothing for a profit into a website called Nasty Gal, named after a song by Betty Davis.

Source: Forbes, MSNBC

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates — Age 16

Year: 1972

In high school, Gates and a friend named Paul Allen launched a business called Traf-o-Data. The company automated the process of analyzing traffic flow data for roads in Washington.

The company continued to operate even after the two finished high school, went to — and quit — college, and on through when the pair launched Microsoft in 1975. Traf-O-Data eventually failed because of what Allen called a "flawed business model," and the two focused their efforts on Microsoft.

Source: CNBC

Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang — Age 25

Year: 1994

Yang met Yahoo cofounder David Filo in an class they took together at Stanford as PhD candidates in electrical engineering. They started working on Yahoo as a side project, in order to keep track of their favorite links on the internet. The eventually launched the online directory as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in a campus trailer in January 1994. The site got 1 million hits for the first time that year in the fall.

Source: Yahoo, Forbes

TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque — Age 28

Year: 2008

Busque and her husband got the idea for TaskRabbit from a conversation one night about how they needed to buy dog food for their yellow lab named Kobe. 

"Wouldn't it be nice to go somewhere online and say, 'We need dog food,' name a price we'd be willing to pay, and find someone in our neighborhood, maybe at the store that very moment, who could help us?" Busque told Business Insider in 2011.

The company was first named Runmyerrand.com. Busque quit a job at IBM to build the company, which later became Task Rabbit.

Source: Business Insider

Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey — Age 23

Year: 1999

Dorsey is a two-time college dropout. While at his first school, the University of Missouri-Rolla, he hacked into the website for a company called Dispatch Management Services and found a security flaw. The company's founder, Gregg Kidd, hired Dorsey immediately and convinced him to move to New York, where the offices were located.

Dorsey enrolled in NYU while there, but dropped out shortly after to move with Kidd to San Francisco. The two then launched a software company called dNet that provided same-day delivery for online purchases. They secured early funding from the investment group Band of Angels, but the company soon flopped. Dorsey wouldn't help create Twitter for another six years.

Source: WIRED, Vanity Fair

SoftBank cofounder Masayoshi Son — Age 24

Year: 1981

Even before launching SoftBank at age 24, Son was already a millionaire. He made money as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley through two separate ventures: leasing video game consoles to local bars and restaurants, and developing a pocket-sized electronic translator sold to Sharp Electronics in 1979.

Upon returning to Japan, Son launched SoftBank as a computer parts and software distributor. The company has since invested billions of dollars in massive tech startups like Uber, the We Company (aka WeWork), and DoorDash.

Source: Ars Technica

Glossier founder Emily Weiss — Age 25

Year: 2010

While a student at NYU, Weiss interned at Teen Vogue, where she had a brief cameo on the reality show "The Hills." After graduating, she worked as a styling assistant at Vogue, during which Weiss launched a blog on women's beauty and lifestyle called "Into the Gloss." She ran the website in the morning, between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., while keeping her day job at Vogue.

In a year, Weis had grew her website to 10 million page views a month, and she was able to quit her job at Vogue to work full-time on her blog. A few years later, Weiss launched Glossier, the e-commerce platform for easy-to-use and affordable skincare and beauty products.

Source: Entrepreneur

Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel — Age 22

Year: 2011

Spiegel first floated the idea for Snapchat to his product design class at Stanford in April 2011. His class saw Spiegel's final project proposal, to share pictures with friends that would disappear forever, as a "terrible idea."

 A few months later during the summer, Spiegel and cofounders Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown launched Snapchat. The app was originally named "Picaboo," and the three built it from the home of Spiegel's dad in Los Angeles. The Snapchat CEO dropped out of Stanford a few credits shy of graduation to work on Snapchat, although he returned to school to finish his degree in 2018.

Source: Forbes, Fortune

Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma — Age 29

Year: 1994

Ma quit a job teaching English at local university to launch a translation company called the Haibo Translation Agency ("haibo" translates to "vast like the sea"). While helping a Chinese firm recover a payment through his translation business, Ma visited the US in 1995 and encountered his first internet-connected computer. 

Ma's first online search was "beer," but he was surprised to find that no Chinese beers turned up in the results. It was then that he decided to found an internet company for China, which later became Alibaba.com.

Source: Hangzhou Hope Translation Agency, Washington Post

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd — Age 19

Year: 2010

As a senior at Southern Methodist University, Wolfe launched the "Help Us Project," a business through which she told bamboo tote bags to benefit victims and areas affected by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Wolfe's bags received national attention, and were used by celebrities including Nicole Richie, Denise Richards, and the Kardashians.

Wolfe went on the help found Tinder, then launched her own dating app Bumble designed to let women call the shots.

Source: SMU Daily Campus, Guardian

Google cofounders Larry Page & Sergey Brin — Age 25

Year: 1998

The Google cofounders met in 1995, when Brin toured Page around Stanford University. Brin was a graduate student in Stanford's computer science department, and Page was considering attending the school. They reportedly both found each other "obnoxious" at first, but they became classmates when Page enrolled as a PhD student.

The two started working together on a research project about cataloging every link on the internet, called "BackRub" at the beginning. The two soon dropped out of Stanford, and founded Google in 1998 out of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California.

Source: Wired, Business Insider

Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison — Age 32

Year: 1977

After Ellison dropped out of college twice, he worked a series of jobs in California where he picked up computer and programming skills. He landed at a tech company called Ampex, where one of his responsibilities was to build a database for the CIA. He and two Ampex coworkers, Ed Oates and Bruce Scott, left the company to start a database consulting company called Software Development Laboratories. Their new company secured a contract with the CIA to build a database, using the programming language SQL. The database management system they built was code-named Oracle, which then became the name of the company.

Source: Business Insider, CNBC

LearnVest founder Alexa von Tobel — Age 25

Year: 2009

In her 20s, Alexa von Tobel was heading to Harvard Business School, but spent a significant amount of her time thinking about the lack of personal finance resources that existed. She decided to drop out of Harvard and move to New York amid the 2008 recession to launch a personal finance company called LearnVest.

Source: TIME

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs — Age 21

Year: 1976

Jobs and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak first met through a mutual friend in 1971, before either started college, and became friends. They often worked together on small technology projects, and together attended meetings held by the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975. Jobs and Wozniak became interested in computers at these meetings, and turned their hobby into the company Apple soon after.

The two Steves worked out of the garage in the house owned by Jobs' parents. Neighbors often saw Jobs hold meetings out of this garage clad in cutoff jeans and barefoot.

Source: Mercury News, Macworld

GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons — Age 33

Year: 1984

Before he started web hosting company GoDaddy in 1997, Parsons founded a tax software company called Parsons Technology. He started the company in the basement of his house in Iowa after teaching himself how to write code. Parsons Technology grew to more than 1,000 employees, and was sold to Inuit in 1994 for $64 million.

Source: Forbes, Bob Parsons' Website

Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani — Age 29

Year: 2005

Trapani was an early employee of Gawker Media under its founder, Nick Denton. Trapani wrote code for Kinja, a blog reader that later became the commenting system used across Gawker's websites. 

Denton reportedly discovered the domain name "lifehacker.com" was available and purchased it. He didn't have plans to do anything with it, but Trapani was enthusiastic about its potential opportunity, and Denton made her the site's editor and let her develop it based on her vision. The site, a self improvement and tech blog, launched in early 2005 with the support of Gawker and a sponsorship from Sony.

Source: Hover

Tumblr founder David Karp — Age 19

Year: 2006

Karp never finished high school (he dropped out at 14), or attended college. That didn't stop him from entering the tech scene, and becoming the chief technology officer for a now-defunct online messaging board called UrbanBaby, that was bought by CNET in 2006.

He made "several thousand dollars" off the sale, which he used to start his own company called Davidville. Karp used Davidville to develop various Internet companies, including Tumblr.

Source: New York Times

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — Age 30

Year: 1994

Bezos left his job at hedge fund D.E. Shaw to launch Amazon.com, which started as an online bookseller. He drove across the country with his wife at the time, MacKenzie, to found Amazon in Seattle. The Amazon CEO spent to entire car ride "tapping out a business plan on his computer along the way" and "calling prospective investors on a cell phone."

Source: Business Insider