Everyone needs a place to escape when life gets a little too stressful.

Tech giants are no exception, but they have taken the whole vacation-home-thing to the next level.

These multi-millionaires spend their leisure time on golf courses, next to the ocean, and on islands they own.

This past winter, Bill Gates rented out this $600,000 a month mansion in Wellington, Florida

The spacious rental is 7,352 square feet with eight bedrooms and six bathrooms

The luxury vacation home sits on four acres and has its own stable and horse training area

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Tim Cook's staggering $378 million compensation for 2011 made Larry Ellison look like a relative pauper.

The Oracle CEO earned $77.5 million in 2011, according to a new report on the highest paid Valley executives by the San Jose Mercury News.

But Cook, who became Apple's CEO last year, can't exactly cash in yet. Most of his pay, $376.2 million, was in a one-time grant of restricted stock units—RSUs—which only gradually convert into shares he owns and can sell over the course of 10 years. He was granted 1 million shares of Apple when he took the CEO role.  Those shares are worth almost $600 million now, the Merc notes.

So he had to get by on a 2011 salary of $900,000 and a bonus of $900,000—and the $11.1 million he made after taxes by selling 37,500 shares from a grant made two years ago. He got those as an incentive to stick around when Steve Jobs went on medical leave, reports Apple Insider.

Apparently that was enough, as Cook turned down an estimated $75 million in compensation in May. The Apple board decided to award employees holding RSUs "dividend equivalents," on their shares, even though they technically didn't own them yet. $75 million would have been Tim Cook's payout.

Most of Ellison's pay is in stock, too. $62.6 million. And of course, he's not a pauper. Ellison's net worth is about $36 billion, making him America's third-richest person, so he probably doesn't mind being No. 2 in the Valley for one year.

Don't Miss: 10 Reasons You Wish You Were Larry Ellison

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Larry Ellison bought his own Hawaiian island, but the previous owner isn't quite done with it yet.

The AP reports billionaire David Murdock, who sold the island to Ellison, will be holding on to three key pieces of property.

He'll have his seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 44,921-square-foot mansion worth over $6 million.

He'll keep his grocery store, which is one of just three grocery stores on the island.

And, most controversially, he'll keep the rights to a wind farm project that people of Lanai hate.

Some other fun stuff he negotiated for himself:

• a lot across the street from the home

• assorted apartments

• two massive wood sculptures that reside in a resort lobby

• two carved elephant tusks

• a woodworking shop that makes furniture

• and 1,000 rare orchid plants.

This info was revealed through documents filed to the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission. What isn't known is how much Ellison paid for 98 percent of the island’s 141 square miles. The Maui News reported that Murdock had wanted to sell for sometime and was looking fo  $500 million to $600 million.

But if Ellison doesn't get to keep those 1,000 rare orchids, well, who knows how much he was willing to pay.

Don't miss: 10 Reasons You Wish You Were Larry Ellison

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Forbes released its annual list of the 400 richest Americans today, and while there are familiar faces at the top, some billionaires had better years than others.

We combed the list to see which billionaires on this year's list had the biggest gains and losses since September 2011.

Biggest Losers:

1. Mark Zuckerberg (-$8.1 billion) The Facebook founder and CEO saw his initial IPO fail, causing a massive loss in his fortune.

2. John Paulson (-$4.5 billion) Double-digit losses at his firm has caused his hedge fund to lose a whopping $14 billion in assets.

3. George Soros (-$3 billion) The hedge fund magnate saw a slight dip in production, but his charitable donations account for a majority of the drop-off.

4. Harold Simmons (-$2.2 billion) His Valhi holdings company dropped 30 percent in value over the last year, costing him dearly.

5. Anne Cox Chambers (-$1.3 billion) The media empress saw her net worth decline in part because of a decline in her public competitors.

6. Mark Pincus (-$1.24 billion) The CEO of Zynga fell completely out of the Forbes 400 because of the decline of his company's games and the Facebook IPO flop.

7. Philip Falcone (-$1.1 billion) The CEO of Harbinger Capital dropped out of the Forbes 400 in part due to an SEC investigation into his company.

8. Robert Stiller (-$1.05 billion) The innovator behind Green Mountain Coffee was forced to liquidate many of his shares in the company, reducing his net worth to roughly $250 million.

9. Sheldon Adelson (-$1 billion) Shares in his Las Vegas Sands casino decreased, causing the billion dollar loss.

10. Sam Zell (-$900 million) A lowered estimate of the value of Zell's Equity International stake caused the decrease in estimated net worth.

And now the gainers ...

Biggest Winners:

1. Larry Ellison (+$8 billion) The Oracle CEO has seen his company's stock increase by 20 percent since August 2011.

2. Bill Gates (+$7 billion) Despite giving away billions, Microsoft's 20 percent bump in shares over the last year and Gates' private investments have led to the monetary gain.

3. Warren Buffett (+$7 billion) Buffett is another billionaire who's seen his company's (Berkshire Hathaway) shares go up 20 percent over the last year.

4. Charles Koch (+$6 billion) A rise in revenues for his chemical and Georgia Pacific properties greatly increased his net worth.

5. David Koch (+$6 billion) Like his brother, the earnings made by Koch Industries ballooned his worth.

6. Jim Walton (+$5.7 billion) An heir to the Walmart fortune, that company's growth and his role as the CEO of Arvest Bank contributed to his gains.

7. S. Robson Walton (+$5.6 billion) Walmart's board chairman has received over $420 million in dividends alone over the last year.

8. Michael Bloomberg (+$5.5 billion) When he's not busy being mayor of New York City, Bloomberg's eponymous company saw its earnings go up 20 percent since 2011.

9. Alice Walton (+$5.4 billion) She also benefits from the Walmart empire, but her donations to a new art museum ensured she'd only be ninth on the list.

10. Jeff Bezos (+$4.1 billion) The Amazon founder and CEO saw his company register over $48 billion in 2011 sales.

Now meet the 10 wealthiest people in America >

Please follow The Life on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Oracle has given its CEO, one of the wealthiest men in the world, a big 24 percent raise.

In 2011, Larry Ellison raked in $77.6 million in total compensation, mostly in stock options. In its fiscal 2012, Ellison’s pay jumped to $90.7 million, according to the company's annual proxy statement filed to the the SEC today.

The pay isn't a total gimme to Ellison, who is a cofounder, CEO and chairman. A chunk of the stock options granted to him – 7 million –  let him buy Oracle stock at $32.43 a share. These were granted in June, 2011 and they've been mostly under water with the stock trading below $32 since then. It crested the $33 mark on Sept. 18 but didn't stay there long.

That hasn't hurt him much. He also has millions of options that he can buy for $21 or less.

He earned himself some $31.7 million by exercising some 2.2 million of his options last year.

Ellison's pay also included an $8.4 million bonus, but it was only half of what he could have earned under the bonus plan. Oracle also picks up a $1.5 million tab for his security guards.

And his $1 salary.

So, is Ellison worth it? Maybe so.

Last week, Oracle reported that net income rose 17 percent to $9.98 billion in its 2012 fiscal year.

Not that Oracle doesn't have its weaknesses, but Ellison seems to have a reasonable plan for them. For instance, Oracle's big bet on a thriving hardware business has been sketchy, with revenues declining but the overall hardware business is profitable.

Oracle has so far missed the boat on cloud computing. But enterprises are not ready to yank out their databases and replace them with cloud alternatives, or even other new tech, like "No SQL" databases. That won't happen for years, maybe decades. Meanwhile Ellison is ramping Oracle up to be a cloud player, and still has plenty of time to figure it all out.

Don't miss: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? What Happened To The People In This Iconic Photo Of Oracle's Founders

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Larry Ellison just announced that Oracle was launching a brand new cloud computing service.

Oracle will now be offering "infrastructure as a service" as the industry calls it, or "hardware as a service" as Ellison dubbed it tonight. He was speaking during the opening keynote of the company's annual OpenWorld conference being held in San Francisco this week.

For a guy that once called cloud computing "complete gibberish," he's now offering clouds in every way they can be offered: software-as-a-service (where companies pay monthly to use an app over the Internet), platform-as-a-service (where companies pay monthly to have someone else host their apps, typically custom-developed apps) and infrastructure-as-a-service (where companies rent all of the hardware, can set it up the way they want, and use it to host whatever apps they want.)

There are two versions of Oracle's new IaaS cloud. One is a "public cloud" similar to the kind of clouds offered by Amazon, Rackspace, HP, and others, where the hardware is located in Oracle's data centers. It includes compute services and storage services, Ellison said.

The second is the so-called Oracle Private cloud, where a replica of Oracle's public cloud is put in the customer's own data center. Oracle would still own the hardware and be responsible for running it, securing it and updating it.

"We own it. We manage it. We upgrade it. You only pay for what you use," Ellison told attendees.

Oracle isn't the only company offering private clouds. HP, IBM and lots of others do the same.

Oracle's selling point over the competition is that it's using exactly the same hardware and software in its private cloud as it uses in its public cloud. That would be its Exalogic and Exadata computers. These have been specifically designed to host Oracle's software and database.

The two new cloud services were part of four big announcements Ellison made on Sunday night.

The third announcement was that Oracle invented a brand new kind of database, designed specifically for the cloud. It's dubbed Oracle 12c (the c stands for cloud) and it let's multiple companies share the same database. Or a company with many Oracle databases can use 12c to easily consolidate all them onto one set of server/storage hardware. The Oracle 12c database will be available in 2013.

The fourth announcement was for a new hardware product that is a direct competitor to rival SAP's HANA database. Ellison introduced Exadata x3 and says that it will be bigger and faster than HANA, as well as rival server products from IBM and HP but that it will cost far less. Exadata x3 prices start at $200,000.

"If you talk to an Oracle salesperson, you can get a better price than that. I know these guys and gals and they are always ready to deal," Ellison promised.

Don't miss: The 10 Most Disruptive Enterprise Tech Companies

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Sometime next year, Oracle will launch a brand new kind of database. It's called Oracle 12c and the c stands for cloud.

Larry Ellison has been eating a lot of crow in 2012 over his previous not-too-high opinion of cloud computing. In 2008, he said cloud computing was nothing but a bunch of hype, "It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

He also badmouthed the basic concept behind the cloud, something called "multi-tenancy," where multiple companies share the same hardware.  For instance, Amazon's cloud is actually its own IT infrastructure, rented out to whoever else wants to use it. That's what makes cloud computing so affordable.

Flash forward to Sunday where Ellison acknowledged that he was "very critical of this notion of multi-tenancy" and then said he's no longer opposed to it and announced what he describes as the "first multi-tenant database in the world."

Despite the flip-flop, 12c is a really good idea to get enterprises interested in Oracle's next big version of its database.

12c is what Ellison calls a "container database." It's function is to hold lots of other databases, keeping their data separate, but allowing them to share underlying hardware resources like memory or file storage.

12c is for software-as-a-service tech companies that need a way to let multiple customers access a single database. It's also geared toward large enterprises who may have hundreds of Oracle databases. It would let them consolidate their databases onto less hardware, saving them money on that and making all of those databases easier to manage.

Companies can already do this kind of consolidation to some extent with software from VMware. VMware makes virtualization software that lets lots of software apps, including Oracle databases, share a single hardware server. But if VMware isn't set up right, the Oracle database could perform more slowly.

With 12c, Ellison promises that Oracle databases will get faster, saying that compared to the current database, Oracle 11, 12c "uses one-sixth as much hardware and runs five times as many databases."

What Ellison didn't mention was if Oracle would be changing its licensing structure with 12c. Oracle figures out how much to charge an enterprises for its database by adding up the number of processors on the server. That's a throw-back to the days when one piece of software ran on one computer. Oracle licensing gets even more complicated when using VMware. When combining lots of databases onto one server, it would be wise to change it's pricing scheme altogether.

Customers will have the best chance of negotiating better fees if they also consolidate databases onto a new hardware server also introduced Sunday night. It's called Exadata x3 and its Oracle's competitor to SAP HANA. The new version can run a mind-boggling amount of data in memory in real time.

With this new hardware you "can ask a question and get an answer at the speed of thought," Ellison said.

Ellison claims that with x3, enterprises won't need to buy traditional storage from companies like EMC or Hitachi anymore.

Oracle will clearly try to sell it as the best server for the new cloud database.

Ellison also announced two new clouds to compete with Amazon, HP and IBM, too.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Last night, Larry Ellison introduced a new server that uses flash memory to make its database run a lot faster.

Exadata X3 is its name, and it is Oracle's answer to SAP's Hana database, which has been taking the database world by storm since it began shipping about 15 months ago.

SAP now has about 500 Hana customers and is the fastest growing product in SAP's history, SAP executives say.

Ellison didn't spend much time dissing his competitor, SAP. But he couldn't resist one barb.

"SAP has an in-memory database that's a little smaller than what we offer," Ellison said. "I think her name is Hana. I promised Mark [Hurd] that I would not mention them [SAP]. I'm glad to keep my promise."

Steve Lucas, SAP's EVP of database technology, had a bone to pick with his claims.

"Let's just say it's taken me 24 hours to get my eyebrows to lower to their normal position," Lucas told Business Insider.

Lucas says Hana is a different kind of database. It's not just keeping records like a typical database (like recording that a pair of jeans was sold), it's also doing analytics (how many jeans were sold last year), predictive analytics (how many will sell next year), and social media sentiment (how people feel about the jeans).

Making an old-school database faster by putting it in a superfast piece of hardware is not going to hurt Hana, Lucas says.

"You've got a company with a $10 billion database albatross around their neck, and a multibillion hardware albatross around their neck, so their solution is to throw more hardware at the same old tired software. It's a myopic view that what companies need is a faster database," Lucas said. "It absolutely fries my brain."

Lucas also points out that if Ellison wants to talk "speeds and feeds"—an industry term for competing based on how big or fast a piece of equipment is—IBM is already selling an enormous 100-terabyte in-memory database system using Hana, upgradable to 250 terabytes. Sunday night, Ellison said that a single Exadata X3 system can hold as much as 26 terabytes of data.

The SAP executive who spearheaded Hana, Vishal Sikka, laughed it all off.

"My little girl Hana is out there on Oracle," Sikka told Business Insider. "She must be beating Oracle's databases like a drum."

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson has brilliantly wiggled out of a tough spot. His company was on a collision course with Oracle, the tech giant run by Larry Ellison, Nelson's ex-boss and the original backer of NetSuite.

Under Ellison, Oracle has gone head first into cloud computing, including launching online versions of its Oracle Fusion apps, its flagship financial, enterprise resource planning, and human resources apps.

But wait! That was supposed to be the role of NetSuite, a company Ellison backed at its founding in 1998.

So Nelson and Ellison today announced a good plan to more or less divide the market—and conquer their enemies.

Oracle's Fusion apps will be for large enterprise deals. NetSuite will go after the midsized market and deals involving smaller business units of large enterprises, going head-to-head with Microsoft and SAP.

New software unveiled today will let subsidiaries using NetSuite easily integrate with headquarters running Oracle installations, so it doesn't have to be an either-or choice.

"If Oracle and NetSuite are [at] the same table, one of us in wrong deal," Nelson told Business Insider. Together, they can focus on their joint enemy, SAP, which Nelson says is trying to grab more midmarket share with its big push into cloud.

Ellison was well-motivated to agree. He and his family actually still own more than 50 percent of NetSuite. Those shares are locked in a "nonvoting trust," Nelson said, meaning they vote in proportion to how other shareholders vote. Ellison can, however, still vote on changes of leadership, perhaps the most important question shareholders tackle.

"Oracle wanted him to basically have those shares locked up to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest," Nelson says.

 NetSuite shares have more than doubled from a low of $25.32 a year ago. With shares trading above $60 today, NetSuite has a $4.4 billion market cap. Ellison's stake is worth a sizeable $2 billion-plus.

Granted, Ellison, one of the world's richest men, is worth about $38 billion. But why push NetSuite off a cliff if there's a better way?

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Most of the time, Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is credited with inventing the new cloud model for delivering software via the Web.

But Larry Ellison, who once famously denounced the term "cloud computing," is now standing up to take credit for the concept, if not the currently fashionable term. 

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson told Business Insider that he can vouch for Ellison. Nelson worked with Ellison, Benioff, and another key player, Evan Goldberg, at Oracle back in the 1990s.

Goldberg really thought up the idea of software as a service, says Nelson. Goldberg was "an incredible developer" and Ellison wanted to invest in him, according to Nelson.

In a meeting, Goldberg described his idea to Ellison of building "a version of Siebel but on the Internet," Nelson says. (Siebel was the biggest customer-relationship management software maker of the day.)

Ellison said the idea was interesting but "no one runs their business on Siebel. You have to build the back office first, the accounting system and the ERP system, and then you build the other systems around it," Nelson recounted.

So Goldberg agreed to do that and Ellison funded it. The company was born as NetLedger. It would later change its name to NetSuite.

"There was one other guy in that conversation and that guy was Marc Benioff. Benioff called back two weeks later and said 'I'm going to do that Siebel online thing,' and that became Salesforce.com. Larry funded both of those companies," says Nelson.

And until last year, Ellison held a soft spot in his heart for Benioff, giving him a keynote at Oracle's annual conference OpenWorld.

That relationship fell apart in 2011. In 2005, Oracle bought Siebel, Benioff's biggest competition, and a quiet feud began to simmer.  In 2011, Benioff got yanked from the speakers' list at OpenWorld. So he invited everyone to come hear him talk at a hotel across the street.

This year, Benioff wasn't invited to speak at OpenWorld at all.

Taking his place today at OracleWorld, in a prime keynote spot, was Nelson, who joined Goldberg's company in 2002. He talked about a cozy new partnership with Oracle where NetSuite's cloud software can work with Oracle's E-Business Suite. The idea is to divide the market so that Oracle gets the big enterprise deals, and NetSuite gets the midsized deals and can even snag some business alongside Oracle.

Good thing Ellison hedged his cloud-computing bets.

Don't miss: The 10 Most Disruptive Enterprise Tech Companies

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Oracle's acquisition of computer server maker Sun Microsystems has been an albatross around the company's neck practically since Day One.

But Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says those days will soon be gone. He promises the hardware unit will show revenue growth this fiscal year.

Ellison discussed it yesterday during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC (see video below):

We have two hardware businesses. We have a hardware business that we care about—this is Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics—kind of our new generation of hardware and software engineered to work together. So that’s growing at more than 100%. But then we have another hardware business, kind of the old commodity x86 business which is similar. It is basically taking Intel microprocessors, adding memory and selling these commodity boxes and that business is shrinking. So we’ve got two things going on. We’ve got this old Sun business of selling commodity hardware which is disappearing, which we don’t care about at all, and our new business of selling engineered systems which is more than doubling. And the old business is shrinking slightly faster than the new business is growing. But those two lines will cross at the end of this fiscal year and we’ll get very rapid growth because the bulk of our business will be engineered systems and this new, very hot Unix box [with] SPARC T4 [processors] which is also growing very, very rapidly."

It's not just Ellison saying that. Oracle could be showing growth in its hardware business by May, Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund told Business Insider.

"The commodity x86 server and storage are declining at 40% a year," Sherlund said. "The SPARC T4 server is doing well, but it's likely cannibalizing Oracle's commodity hardware business."

Sherlund expects Oracle's hardware business to be flat by the February quarter and show positive growth by around May 2013.

But, he points out, this is not a turnaround for the traditional Sun business.

All the real growth coming from its "Exa" line of hardware, which were Oracle's own designs, created before it acquired Sun. The Exa systems were originally designed with its partner, HP.

When Oracle bought Sun, the partnership with HP devolved to the point where the two were suing each other. So Oracle may have gotten some talent from Sun to bring the Exa line in-house, but it also had to have that talent, since buying Sun hurt its relationship with HP.

In other words, it's still not clear exactly what big benefit Oracle gained from buying Sun.

Oracle employees have told Business Insider that after the Sun acquisition Oracle's sales team had been dysfunctional, ill-equipped to sell hardware and fighting over deals. Many blamed head of North American sales, Keith Block. Over the summer, Oracle parted ways with Block, who had also made some controversial comments about Sun hardware that ended up appearing in Oracle's lawsuit with Hewlett-Packard.

Are you an Oracle insider with information to share? We want to hear it. We are discreet. jbort@businessinsider.com or on Twitter @Julie188.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has at last explained why he bought a big chunk of the state of Hawaii when he purchased the island of Lanai this summer.

He's going to turn Lanai into a "model for sustainable enterprise" using all the latest, eco-friendly technology for power and organic farming. This includes electric cars, turning seawater into fresh water, and using solar power.

"It is going to be a little, if you will, laboratory for sustainability in businesses of small scale," he said yesterday during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC.

Here's the full explanation:

I love Hawaii and Lanai is a very interesting project. There, what we are going to do is turn Lanai into a model for sustainable enterprise. And what I mean by that is—in Lanai, I own the water utility, I own the electric utility, and the electric utility is all going to be solar photovoltaic and solar thermal where it can convert sea water into fresh water. And then we have drip irrigation where we are going to have organic farms all over the island. Hopefully we are going to export produce—really the best, organic produce to Japan and elsewhere. And ... we are going to support the local people and help them start these businesses. We will have electric cars. So it is going to be a little, if you will, laboratory for sustainability in businesses of small scale.

Ellison isn't the only one interested in eco-friendly power on Lanai. The island's previous owner, billionaire, David Murdock, held onto an assortment of Lanai's assets. These included rights to a controversial wind power plant that residents opposed.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

AllthingsD's Liz Gannes found this awesome video of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's million-dollar racing sailboat capsizing during the America’s Cup World Series on Saturday. Pretty dramatic stuff:

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK - (Reuters) - Oracle Corp's Larry Ellison, known for his taste for the finer things in life, is now intrigued by a multibillion dollar sports and entertainment empire.

Ellison, who recently bought a Hawaiian island, is interested in a potential bid for Anschutz Entertainment Group, owned by fellow billionaire Phil Anschutz, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Ellison's interest in AEG, whose owner wants initial bids in the $10 billion range, is preliminary, the sources said.

One of the attractions for Ellison, the third wealthiest man in America who has previously tried to buy sports teams and failed, is that AEG would allow him to buy and relocate a National Football League team to Los Angeles.

The auction for AEG has just started, with investment bankers at Blackstone Advisory Partners sending initial information to bidders earlier this week. The information memorandum, which describes the business but has no financial information, was expected to go to dozens of parties.

Ellison was expected to receive the information memorandum this week, one of the sources said.

Representatives for Ellison, Anschutz and Blackstone declined to comment.

Ellison's name adds to a growing list of billionaires, trade buyers, private equity firms, investment firms and sovereign wealth funds showing an initial interest in the business.

AEG's assets include stakes in the Los Angeles Lakers NBA franchise, the LA Kings pro hockey team, more than 100 worldwide entertainment and sports venues, and the AEG Live concert promotion business.

GROWING LIST

The sports, entertainment and real estate venues in cities such as Los Angeles, London and Shanghai make AEG a potential target for a range of buyers, from real estate companies to wealthy individuals looking for new diversions.

The list of potential AEG buyers includes investment firm Guggenheim Partners LLC and private equity firms such as Thomas H. Lee Partners LP, Bain Capital LLC and Colony Capital LLC.

Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, Los Angeles's richest person with more than $7 billion, has also said he would bid on AEG to use its sports and concert assets to promote a healthy lifestyle to LA citizens.

Still, any deal for the company will be complex, and it remains too early to say whether the initial interest will eventually lead to AEG changing hands.

At around $10 billion for first round bids, Anschutz has set the bar high on price, and he wants many things done his way. The steep price will likely require buyers to form consortiums to do the deal while sources have said Anschutz does not want to break up the company.

The Oracle CEO's interest comes after he actively sought to buy sports teams in the past year. Earlier this year, Ellison inquired about buying pro basketball's Memphis Grizzlies, team owner Michael Heisley told local newspapers, emphasizing that the talks were preliminary. Ellison never made a bid.

Oracle disclosed in a September 21 filing that Ellison had pledged 139 million Oracle shares, valued at $4.3 billion as of Thursday, as "collateral to secure personal indebtedness". Ellison's plans for that money are not known, but he told CNBC that he secured the credit "just in case I go shopping and something catches my eye".

Parties will be able to place bids for AEG once pitch books are submitted by the end of the month. Bidders are likely to need to come up with bids in the "high single-digit, low double-digit" billions of dollars to proceed to the next round, sources have previously said.

(Reporting By Ronald Grover in Los Angeles and Nadia Damouni in New York; Additional reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Paritosh Bansal and Edmund Klamann)

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, whose team won the America's Cup sailing competition in 2010, has had a string of bad luck in the sailing competition.

Yesterday, another one of his $8 million catamarans capsized and was badly damaged, the San Francisco Chronicle reports

The sailing race had just wrapped up its World Series qualifying event, but teams are actively training for the main event in San Francisco next year.

Yesterday, Team Oracle was practicing on the 72-foot-long, carbon-fiber craft when it overturned.

The team had gone through a dramatic capsizing during the World Series, but this one turned out far worse.

A strong current sucked the boat out of the bay, past the Golden Gate and about four miles into the open sea.

The Oracle team sent nine boats to retrieve the craft, known as an AC72, and they did get it back. But the wing, the tall, mast-like part, is toast.

Fortunately, none of the 11 crew on the boat at the time were injured.

The AC72 is a brand-new racing design built by Ellison. It can travel as fast as 40 knots or 46 miles per hour. The speeds at which these boats will be racing, plus the close quarters in the San Francisco Bay, will make for one of the fastest, most exciting and most dangerous America's Cup races ever, Ellison has warned.

Teams need to raise $50 million just to enter the race.

While $8 million is relative peanuts for Ellison, one of the richest men in the world (and getting richer all the time), it's costing him and his team time: He can't race until the boat is fixed.

Don't miss: Gorgeous Action Shots Of The America's Cup World Series >

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff are taking their growing rivalry to the next level. The latest evidence is a new employment ad from Salesforce.com.

On Friday, Salesforce.com announced it wants to hire 40 to 50 people next year to work on a "big project" using the open-source database PostgreSQL—a big threat to Oracle's core database offering.

Salesforce offers software over the Internet to businesses. That software, in turn, runs on Oracle today. The rumor is that Salesforce may be looking at ways to change it.

This ad came just days after Ellison publicly dissed Salesforce.com for offering PostgreSQL to its Heroku cloud-computing customers while using Oracle for its bread-and-butter Salesforce.com app.

During a talk at Oracle's OpenWorld conference earlier this month in San Francisco, Ellison bragged about Oracle's eat-your-own-dogfood policy: Oracle's cloud software runs on Oracle technology.

"Salesforce.com bases its entire cloud on Oracle database," Ellison said, as reported by Neil McAllister of the Register, "but its database platform offering is PostgreSQL. I find that interesting."

Naturally, Salesforce.com is a big Oracle customer. Larry Ellison helped found Salesforce.com and the whole idea of cloud computing. Salesforce.com's CEO, Marc Benioff, studied at Ellison's knee as an Oracle executive.

But as the two companies increasingly compete with each other, the CEOs are now on the outs. Benioff was removed as a keynote speaker from last year's OpenWorld—so he set up a rival keynote across the street. He wasn't even invited to this year's conference.

Salesforce's job ad appeared a few days after Ellison's remarks. It says that project involves the "design and implement major pieces of the Salesforce.com core database infrastructure" using PostgreSQL.

Salesforce.com wouldn't comment on the project, or the rumors that this was an attempt to switch away from Oracle.

"We're always evaluating/exploring different technologies," a Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider. "We have a broad strategy when it comes to data persistence which includes not only Oracle, but also Postgres, HBase, homegrown file storage, etc."

But some important backers of PostgreSQL sure are excited.

A company called EnterpriseDB makes money by offering commercial support for a version of PostgreSQL.

In the past four years, EnterpriseDB has grown its customer base from about 200 in 2008, to about 2,000 today, including Sony Online Entertainment and TD Ameritrade Ed Boyajian, the company's CEO, Ed Boyajian, told Business Insider. (Skype and Instagram famously use the free, open source version, too.)

"Many of those customers have migrated off Oracle," he said. "That's our primary business."

He added that when a company "of the scale" of Salesforce.com is seen making "making a big commitment" to PostgreSQL, more enterprises will view it as a viable alternative to the Oracle database, too.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Next up for Larry Ellison's racing team: make their wrecked boat fly.

They are using pieces of a wrecked $8 million America's Cup yacht to create an airplane of sorts to compete in a wacky event taking place this weekend in San Francisco, reports Will Kane at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ellison's catamaran capsized in San Francisco Bay while the crew was practicing for the America's Cup sailing race, and was badly damaged. The crew is now waiting for a replacement boat expected to arrive in February so they can get back to training.

In the meantime, San Francisco Bay will be taken over this weekend by an event sponsored by Red Bull, the energy drink, called Flugtag. That's German for "flight day" and it involves a lot of people launching handmade flying contraptions off a 30-foot-tall platform.

The crew has gathered bits of Ellison's boat to make a Flugtag entry. It will still look more like a boat than an airplane. The plan is, more or less, to build a boat-like thing with a tall, 12-foot sail and then turn it on its side, trying to get the sail to act like a wing.

The boat's air flight should be as entertaining for spectators as watching it in a sailing race.

So if you are in the Bay Area this weekend, you might want to check it out. Here's a video of a the Flugtag event that took place last Saturday in Miami.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

It's been more than four months since Larry Ellison bought most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, and residents say they still have qualms about the guy.

They're nervous because the billionaire CEO of tech giant Oracle has yet to speak with citizens or give an interview to the local newspaper, reports Dan Nakaso at the San Jose Mercury News.

The most locals have heard about his plans is what Ellison said during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC last month. He said he would turn the island into one big experiment in sustainable living, green energy, and organic farming.

He also caused a stir when he made plans to use Lanai's only commercial harbor as a winter base for his fleet of America's Cup sailboats without consulting residents.To his credit, he changed his mind when residents protested.

On the other hand, most admit that life under his rule has been way better, so far, than the last guy, David Murdock. Ellison reopened the island's only community pool, Nakaso reports. Murdock had closed it years ago in an effort to cut his expenses on the island.

Ellison has also been upgrading the island's two luxe resorts, which has led to lots of construction jobs and low unemployment. 

But, with a population of 3,200 people, Lanai is more or less a small town, with small-town attitudes. And its people would like to meet their new landlord sooner rather than later.

Update: An earlier version of this story said the Mercury News had reported Ellison had not visited the island. The newspaper reported that Ellison had not spoken to residents.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

As HP takes a massive charge for its $11.1 billion purchase of software company Autonomy a year ago, Oracle gets to say "We told you so."

Last year, Oracle published a blistering set of documents directly contradicting Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch's claim that he hadn't tried to sell his company to Oracle.

HP said this morning that it's taking an $8.8 billion writedown, largely due to alleged accounting fraud at Autonomy.

The two companies, once friendly, now spar viciously and compete directly in the high-end computer hardware business.

In late September 2011, a month after HP's then-CEO, Léo Apotheker, completed the Autonomy deal, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Lynch had tried to sell Autonomy to Oracle in a conference call with analysts. Lynch denied Ellison's claim.

Oracle turned around and published the slide deck that it said Mike Lynch had presented when he visited Oracle and offered to sell his company. Oracle says it wasn't interested in Autonomy "because Autonomy’s current market value of $6 billion was way too high."

In one press release the company said:

Mike Lynch, Autonomy CEO, then publicly denied that his company had been shopped to Oracle.  Specifically, Mr. Lynch said, “If some bank happened to come with us on a list, that is nothing to do with us.” Mr. Lynch then accused of Oracle of being "inaccurate."  Either Mr. Lynch has a very poor memory or he’s lying.

Autonomy's slides that are still hosted for public viewing on Oracle's site. Oracle never expressed concern about the validity of the numbers or Autonomy's accounting—just the company's valuation. But Oracle's statements about Lynch certainly appear in a new light.

Lynch has denied HP's allegations as "false."

Oracle declined fresh comment to the situation, but here is Oracle's press release from 2011:

Another Whopper from Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch

Oracle issued the following statement:

“Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch continues to insist that Autonomy was never ‘shopped’ to Oracle. But now at least he remembers and admits to meeting with Oracle President Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring, Oracle’s head of M&A, this past April. But CEO Lynch insists that it was a purely technical meeting, limited to a ‘lively discussion of database technologies.’ Interesting, but not true. The slides Lynch showed Oracle’s Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring were all about Autonomy’s financial results, Autonomy’s stock price history, Autonomy’s Price/Earnings history and Autonomy’s stock market valuation. Ably assisting Mike Lynch’s attempt to sell Autonomy to Oracle was Silicon Valley’s most famous shopper/seller of companies, the legendary investment banker Frank Quattrone. After the sales pitch was over, Oracle refused to make an offer because Autonomy’s current market value of $6 billion was way too high.

We have put Mike Lynch’s PowerPoint slide sales-pitch up on the Oracle website – Oracle.com/PleaseBuyAutonomy – with the hope Mike Lynch will recognize his slides, his memory will be restored, and he will recall what he and Frank Quattrone discussed during their visit to Oracle last April. Yesterday, the Autonomy CEO did not remember having any meeting with Oracle. Today, he remembers the April meeting and inaccurately describes how it came about and what was discussed (see next paragraph). Tomorrow, he will need to explain his slides.

Mike Lynch describes his meeting with Oracle: “On one of my trips to SF (April 2011), Frank Quattrone whom I have known for a long time offered to introduce me to Mark hurd. Oracle was a customer and I have never met him, so it was a good opportunity. Frank does this from time to time on my visits, he has introduced me to many people. . NOTE: Frank was not engaged by Autonomy and there was no process running. The company was not for sale. I recall meeting with mark and someone else I believe called Doug. At the start of the meeting they joked that frank was there to sell them something. Frank and I made it clear that was not the case. We then met and had a lively discussion about database technologies. The meeting lasted approximately 30 mins. Frank is happy to confirm this.”

Don't miss: Yes, The Accounting Fraud At HP Is Pathetic, But That Wasn't The Worst News In The Report ... >

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Some people know how to live well.

They work hard. They play hard. They have fabulous adventures and pursue exotic dreams.

It's enough to make any normal human a little jealous.

It's also enough to make anyone think a little more about their own passions and dreams.

After all, if these folks can do it, why can't any of us push the boundaries of what we can achieve?

Bill Mai: Creating waves of wealth

Charles River Ventures partner Bill Tai has combined his two favorite things in the world: funding startups and kiteboarding.

His MaiTai Kite Camp in Maui aims to teach entrepreneurs how to do the sport, which involves riding a contraption that combines a surfboard with a kite-like sail—through ocean waves.

Through the end of 2011, graduates of Tai's camp had generated $7 billion in wealth by going public or selling their companies, reports Kym McNicholas on Forbes.

Tai is also a sailor, windsurfer, and Olympic Ambassador for the International Kiteboarding Society.

Jeremy Bloom: From mogul skier to tech mogul

Before founding a tech startup, Jeremy Bloom was an Olympic mogul skier. He also almost became a football player for the Philadelphia Eagles. An injury during training camp kept him from playing.

Today he's the CEO of online-advertising startup Integrate, backed by $15 million of venture capital from Foundry Group, Comcast Ventures, and Liberty Global.

Bloom also created a cool nonprofit called Wish of a Lifetime which grants wishes to people 65 years old or older across the country.

Osman Kent: The rock-and-roll life

Osman Kent made his money by cofounding 3Dlabs and selling it to Creative Labs in 2002 for about $170 million.

He retired and became an aspiring music mogul with his own record label, Songphonic Records. He even bought an English mansion formerly owned by Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera, with its own recording studio.

He came out of retirement earlier this year when he found some irresistible new tech. He used it to found Numecent, which could change how the software industry makes and sells its products.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.