If you need further evidence that there's a kinder gentler Microsoft these days, these photos are your proof.

That's Oracle cofounder and CTO Larry Ellison hanging out with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, with tennis great John McEnroe between them.

Fifteen years ago, when their two companies were hated rivals, no one would ever have predicted such a thing.

They were watching Serena Williams play Monica Niculescu, of Romania, in a qualifying match at the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament in Indian Wells, California on Tuesday. (Williams won.)

And see that guy at the top left of the picture, looking down? That's Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, a former professional tennis player himself. That's another name you wouldn't expect to be hanging out with Gates.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, and even until a few years ago, Gates and Ellison were bitter rivals.

When Microsoft, under Bill Gates' leadership, was being investigated for antitrust violations by the federal government in 2000, Ellison tried to help the feds, hiring private investigators to out some groups that were voicing support for Microsoft. He suspected the groups of being funded by Microsoft. (Ellison was also one of Steve Jobs' best friends, and Jobs and Gates had no love lost throughout much of the time they knew each other, although they eventually became friendlier.)

That lawsuit, which Microsoft eventually lost, was one of the low points of Gates' career, and many say that it was a key reason he stepped down as CEO and became the company's chief software architect.

After that, Gates started pouring more energies into his philanthropic efforts, and in 2008 left Microsoft to run his foundation full time. But last year, when Satya Nadella took over as CEO, Gates stepped back into a formal advisory role at Microsoft.

These days he is described as the happiest guy on the planet– a long way from his tantrum-throwing CEO days.

The two companies have been slowly burying the hatchet. In 2013, they announced a surprise new partnership.

Ellison also signed The Giving Pledge, a vow to give most of his wealth to charity, an idea hatched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Ellison signed the pledge because Buffett asked him to, he said.

This is all part of a new Microsoft, as the company slowly  makes friends out of most of its former enemies.

And now, Gates and Ellison are hanging out together in public.

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Oracle just reported a fairly solid third-quarter revenue, which fell short of Wall Street's expectations basically because of the same foreign exchange rate problems that's been hurting all the big multinational companies.

The interesting thing is how co-founder, CTO, and chairman of the board Larry Ellison used the earnings press release to throw cold water at one of the company's rivals, Salesforce, saying Oracle's cloud is selling as well, or maybe better than, Salesforce's.

We are well on our way to selling over $1 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business in calendar 2015. Salesforce.com has announced that it also expects to add about $1 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this year. So it’s going to be a close race who sells more in the cloud this year, us or them. Stay tuned.

It's pretty rare that one company mentions a competitor by name in an earnings press release. Most competitive trash talk happens with analysts on the earnings conference call after the release.

But Ellison seemed to be eager to respond to some trash dished at Oracle by Salesforce cofounder and CEO Marc Benioff last month, during his company's record-breaking earnings.

These two companies have a complicated relationship. Salesforce cofounder Benioff studied at Ellison's knee becoming its youngest executive at the time. When he left to found Salesforce, he did it with Ellison's blessing and seed money. Salesforce is still a huge customer of Oracle's database.

But then the two companies began to compete head on and these two strong willed leaders began to butt heads in public. In 2013, it looked like they were making amends and announced a big partnership deal where Salesforce agreed to buy a bunch of Oracle tech.

But things have been devolving, again. Talking to analysts on Salesforce's last earnings call, Benioff slammed Oracle (and SAP), making fun of the name of its home-grown cloud product. Oracle calls the product "Fusion" and on the call, Benioff called it "confusion."

So, like we said, Ellison didn't even wait for the call to start trash talking Salesforce.

Regardless of the fighting, both companies seem to be doing quite well, with their stocks recently hitting all-time highs. 

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Oracle is hosting a couple of conferences simultaneously this week in Washington, D.C., and the star attraction was supposed to be the company's flamboyant, billionaire cofounder and CTO, Larry Ellison.

Ellison was scheduled to talk mid-day at one event and in the evening at the other.

People assembled for the first speech and after a long delay, Ellison never showed.

He was there in D.C., but was struck with laryngitis, Oracle finally told the crowd.

The flummoxed organizers had no pinch hitter, so the crowded room was told to just go hang out with each other and "network."

Here's a picture of the crowd waiting to hear Ellison:

The reaction to all of this, naturally, hit Twitter, where attendees took it all in good-natured stride:

Here's a joke reference to Ellison's former love of hostile takeovers, notable Oracle's take-over of PeopleSoft, one of the most vicious corporate fights in software history.

Ellison was feeling ok last week. He was hanging out at the at the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament, seen with lots of famous people, even Bill Gates.

This was a far nicer crowd than the one Ellison ditched in 2013 when he skipped a keynote at his own customer conference to watch his team race in the America's Cup. Some attendees were really ticked off about that.

He had to cancel the other keynote speech, too, at HCM World, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.

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Just like her father, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Oscar-nominated producer Megan Ellison is turning out to be quite the real estate mogul.

According to Variety, she recently paid $5.25 million for a five-bedroom home in the Mount Olympus section of the Hollywood Hills. Strangely enough, the house is right next door to the eight-acre estate that she purchased for $30 million in 2013. 

Also that year, she sold a different collection of three homes above the Sunset Strip for a combined $46.7 million.

The new home has 5,240 square feet of space and boasts gorgeous city views.

The interior is covered in marble from Italy and Brazil.

Huge glass panels open to a patio.

The kitchen features an island and lots of stainless steel.

Even the most optimistic of today's big-dreaming tech luminaries — people like Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page — know that living forever is a most-likely impossible goal.

Yet they still want to defeat death.

At the very least, they want to find a way to delay it as long as possible.

The quest for eternal life goes back thousands of years with mostly unimpressive results. But since 1840, life expectancy in developed countries has risen from the low-to-mid 40s to about 80. We're living almost twice as long as we would have if we were born less than two centuries ago.

So can we almost double life expectancy again, to 150?

That's a goal that these Silicon Alley luminaries agreed was "worthy" and reasonable at a 2004 dinner party, held with some of the top scientists interested in prolonging life, according to a fascinating Washington Post profile by Ariana Eunjung Cha.

And these billionaires don't just have money at their disposal, Cha notes in her detailed look at their efforts to defy death, they also have access to modern medicine, genetics, efforts to map the human brain, and computers that can process quantities of information so huge they've never even been conceived of before. We know more about human health than we ever have and have access to tools that didn't exist decades ago.

Cha writes of these "tech titans:"

Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

Here's some of what they've done so far:

• Larry Ellison, Oracle founder, has "donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research" according to Cha, who says he told his biographer "Death has never made any sense to me... How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?"
• In 2013, Larry Page founded Calico, a company that's trying to prevent aging — with $750 million from Google.
• Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs exists to fund the "radical science" and "bold ideas," including projects to grow bones from stem cells, research into ways to repair the cellular damage that occurs with age, and ways to quickly cool organs in order to preserve them.
• Biologist Pam Omidyar and her husband, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, have donated millions to research that tries to figure out why some people are able to bounce back from diseases.
• Sergey Brin of Google, who has a gene associated with Parkinson's, has given $150 million to efforts to use big data to understand DNA. He thinks these efforts could rapidly transform research into Parkinson's (and other diseases), providing the keys to avoiding neurodegenerative diseases that cut life short.
• Some of the biggest science awards of the year are the six $3 million Breakthrough Prizes, funded by Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg along with Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki (who founded 23andMe, the genetic testing company). According to Cha, they created the prizes to support scientists whose discoveries extend life.

Some fear that extending life would only benefit the wealthy or would create a crowded planet filled with elderly citizens and no good way to support them. And others think that our current longer lives aren't necessarily better — more people live until their minds and bodies are ravaged by diseases that only exist in old age.

These tech billionaires, however, are optimists and think all this can be overcome. Thiel thinks that the "great enemy" of humanity is death.

"I believe that evolution is a true account of nature," he told the Washington Post. "But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society."

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Former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is no stranger to the real estate market — he's been called"the nation's most avid trophy-home buyer" and has all but taken over entire neighborhoods in Malibu and the Lake Tahoe area. 

When asked by CNBC in 2012 why he would buy more homes than he could possibly live in, Ellison referenced his love of art. 

"I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism,"Ellison said to CNBC. "I've got Japanese. I own a home in Kyoto, Japan actually on the temple grounds in Nanzenji that is going to become a Japanese art museum. So, a lot of them are museums." 

Though his 2012 purchase of the Hawaiian island of Lanai has been his largest overall investment by far, he's made a number of blockbuster purchases over the last two decades. 

In 1988, Ellison paid $3.9 million for a William Wurster home in San Francisco's swanky Pacific Heights neighborhood, a popular area that's now home to other tech moguls like Mark Pincus, Jony Ive, and Trevor Traina. Several news outlets reported Ellison planned to buy the home next door for $40 million, but the sale never happened.

Source: Curbed SF 

His home in Woodside, Calif., modeled after a 16th-century Japanese emperor's palace, is worth an estimated $70 million. The 23-acre estate took nine years to design and build, and it was completed in 2004.

Source: SF Gate

He also owns a historic garden villa in Kyoto, Japan, which was reportedly listed for $86 million, though the price he paid is unknown.

Source: SF Gate, Japan Property Central

Pictured: Nanzen-ji Temple, which is right near Ellison's estate

Oracle and Salesforce executives are at each other's throats again.

The two competitors, filled with flamboyant personalities, love to take shots at each other – and there's often a grain of truth when they expose each other's weaknesses.

This week the shots came from the CEOs.

Speaking at the Boston College Chief Executives Club, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd (who shares the CEO job with Safra Catz), blasted Salesforce, reports Greg Ryan and Craig Douglas at the San Francisco Times.

"The reason they have a very high earnings ratio is because they don’t make any money.... There’s no cash flow. So when you look for a category that says ‘cash flow multiplier,’ it says ‘n/a.’ What are they worth right now? $35 billion? Who cares? It’s absurd. But they’re quote-unquote, ‘cool.’ And people ask me for real numbers, they ask, ‘Well, what’s your cash flow?’... What are we worth right now, $190 billion, $180, something like that? And we have to do it with real numbers. It’s crazy, just crazy."

He's not completely wrong. Investors were stoked in February when Salesforce released its year-end earnings, reaching $5 billion in revenue with Benioff promising that that $10 billion was just around the corner (with about $9 billion under contract already). The stock hit a record high and has been floating along at near all-time highs ever since.

At the same time, Salesforce posted a -$146 million loss from operations, largely due to the $2.8 billion it spent last year on marketing and sales to acquire customers.

But Hurd is not completely right either. The company also said it delivered $1.2 billion in operating cash flow in 2015, up 34% year-over-year. It's just that the 15-year-old company is still acting like a startup, investing in itself like crazy.

Hurd's slam followed a slight from Benioff on Wednesday when Salesforce was on stage with Box CEO Aaron Levie at Box's big developer's conference.

Benioff called the executives at his old employer, Oracle, "sensitive."

"You don't think of them as sensitive people, but their feelings are easily hurt," Benioff said. "I have to apologize whenever I hurt their feelings."

We might be wrong, but we guess he's referring to the things he said in February to Wall Street analysts. He picked on Oracle's home-grown cloud computing service, called Oracle Fusion Applications, saying:

"They took 'Fusion' and turned it into 'confusion.' Oracle keeps saying they're growing more quickly than anyone else in the cloud. Well, that's very easy to do when you're starting at zero."

This prompted Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison to slip a slam directly into the company's earnings press release, saying Oracle's cloud will sell as well or better than Salesforce's this year.

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The tech party circuit was unusually busy Wednesday night in San Francisco, and the topic on everybody's lips was the news that Salesforce has hired advisers to consider, and perhaps fend off, a possible takeover.

There's a short list of tech companies with both the money and the potential market fit to buy Salesforce.

Salesforce has a market cap of close to $50 billion; the stock rose more than 10% on Wednesday on the rumor but is back down about 3% on Thursday.

The parties we went to Wednesday night had in attendance venture-capital firms, employees at the startups they funded, and one big tech company.

The conversations were all off the record, so we can't be more specific. But here are some of the interesting theories we heard.

• Larry Ellison wants Marc Benioff as his replacement. According to this theory, Salesforce would willingly sell to Oracle, and Larry Ellison would retire from the company once and for all, installing Benioff as Oracle's new CEO.
  
  Recall that Benioff started at Oracle, and Ellison was an early investor in Salesforce (and even sat on the board for a while). Ellison may have decided that Oracle's current CEOs, Mark Hurd and Safra Katz, are too old-fashioned to bring Oracle into the modern cloud era — Katz has been at Oracle forever and Hurd came from HP. The main argument against this theory was a report from BuzzFeed saying Oracle wasn't the company that approached.

• It has to be Microsoft. Many people at one party were convinced that Microsoft was the would-be buyer. Their reasoning was that no other company has the cash on hand — more than $90 billion — and a big bet on the cloud for its future.
  
  Plus, Salesforce has been cooperating a lot more with Microsoft since Nadella took over, and Benioff has expressed his admiration for Nadella publicly (Benioff was among the attendees at Microsoft's Build conference on Wednesday). This would be the defining early moment in Satya Nadella's CEO-ship, sort of like the failed attempt to buy Yahoo could have ended up defining Ballmer.
• It couldn't possibly be Microsoft. We also heard that Nadella is too new and still lacks the political capital within Microsoft to pull off such a huge acquisition. Plus, it doesn't really fit with the company's business.
  
  Typically, Microsoft focuses on applications that could be used by nearly every employee at a business — think email, Office — and on back-end infrastructure that powers every company. Salesforce makes specialty software for a particular type of employee, not for everyone. Plus, Microsoft has a Salesforce competitor — Dynamics CRM — but it's never been a huge core business for the company. Plus, would Benioff really want to work for Microsoft in anything but the CEO role?
• It's a hail mary from IBM. IBM's Ginni Rometty is in a hard spot. She promised investors that by 2018, IBM will have $40 billion a year in revenue, combined, from four new areas — cloud, data analytics, and enterprise mobility and social connectivity. This person believed there was no way IBM could get to that level without major acquisitions.
  
  Buying Salesforce would give it an immediate cloud revenue stream, and a more credible position in enterprise-social. Plus, Salesforce has a budding analytics business. That said, Benioff seems unlikely to want to sell to IBM unless he got a huge job there, and a hostile takeover would be a big distraction and out of character for IBM.
• It's some big foreign company that nobody is thinking about. A few people took the contra-route and suggested that all the obvious gossip was wrong, and instead Salesforce is fending off a takeover bid from a surprise bidder, perhaps a Chinese giant like Tencent, which would use the move to try to expand into B2B.
• Benioff wants to take the company private. This theory was a little out there, but one person suggested that Benioff is coming to the conclusion that Salesforce will never be able to show the kind of profits that Wall Street wants to justify its valuation. Revenues are growing but so are costs.
  
  This person theorized that Benioff looked at enterprise-software company Infor, which has been majority owned by private equity firm Golden Gate Partners for more than a decade now, and envied the freedom from quarterly expectations enjoyed by that company's CEO, Charles Phillips. (Phillips, like Benioff, was a top exec at Oracle.) But Salesforce is expensive versus its cash flow (about $1 billion a year).

We'll float one more possibility.

Instead of a full buyout, the company that approached Salesforce is interested only in specific assets. For instance, both Microsoft and SAP might be interested in Salesforce's marketing platform (acquired through ExactTarget) as a way to keep on top of Oracle, which has made a bunch of acquisitions in the space (Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai).

Do you know who approached Salesforce? Do you want to add your informed speculation to the pile? Email mrosoff@businessinsider.com.

SEE ALSO: Here's the short list of companies that might want to buy Salesforce

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Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison is about to make it a lot more difficult to visit Lanai, the Hawaiian island he purchased 98% of in 2012. 

As of June 1, the 201-room Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay will close for an extensive renovation process that will take at least three months, Pacific Business News reports.

The other large resort on the island, the 102-room Four Seasons Resort Lanai the Lodge at Koele, will also be closed to the public as it will be used to accommodate construction workers.

The Four Seasons' Manele golf course will remain open, as will its restaurant, Views. 

With both of the resorts closed, 97% of the island's hotel space will be unavailable to tourists. The only hotel that will be open to the public for the summer is the tiny Hotel Lanai, a classic Hawaiian lodge built by pineapple king James Dole in 1923.

With only 11 rooms available in total, reservations are bound to go quickly. 

If you were planning on making the journey to Lanai sometime soon, it will probably have to be a day trip.

Ellison plans to transform Lanai into "the first economically viable, 100 percent green community" and wants to eventually add up to nine smaller hotels, an airport, tennis facilities, and an improved infrastructure. 

SEE ALSO: The incredible real estate portfolio of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison

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Larry Ellison seems to be leaning more and more toward Republican.

He has agreed to host a political fundraiser for Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio, at Ellison's Woodside, California mansion, reports Politico

The VIP reception, will cost attendees $2,700 per person. Couples who have raised (or donated) $27,000 will be invited to dinner.

And Ellison last year hosted a fundraising dinner for Libertarian hero Sen. Rand Paul, reported Venture Beat at the time. (Cost to attend: $1,500 per person to $32,000.)

And Ellison famously chipped in $3 million to Mitt Romney's SuperPAC in 2012.

That said, the tech billionaire, worth about $54 billion, has also been known to support various Democrat candidates, too.

SEE ALSO: The incredible real estate portfolio of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison

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As a child, Larry Ellison's adoptive father repeatedly told him he was good for nothing, according to Fortune.

Today, Forbes estimates Ellison's net worth at $54 billion, making him the third-richest person in the US.

Before he founded Oracle, the database software firm that made his fortune, Ellison grew up in a working-class Chicago family of Jewish immigrants.

"I was raised on the South Side of Chicago," he said in an oral history for the Smithsonian Institution. "I remember Look Magazine called it the oldest and worst black ghetto in the United States."

When Ellison was born in 1944, his mother was unmarried, according to a profile in Fortune. She gave him to relatives to raise, and Ellison never met his biological father.

He dropped out of college twice — first from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then the University of Chicago — before moving to California and working odd jobs.

In his oral history, he recalled, "I never took a computer science class in my life. I got a job working as a programmer; I was largely self-taught. I just picked up a book and started programming."

When Ellison landed a programming job at Ampex Corporation, one of his responsibilities at the company was building a database for the CIA, Business Insider's Madeline Stone notes. In 1977, he and two coworkers left Ampex to start a database management company of their own.

Knowing that no one would want to take a risk on a brand new product, Ellison and his cofounders chose not to label their first release "Version 1.0." 

"The very first version was Oracle Version 2," he admitted at a customer conference last year.

Their ploy worked. Oracle's first customer was a big one: the CIA. Their product later became the most popular database ever sold. That success paid off for Ellison — according to the Wall Street Journal, he was the highest-paid executive in the US before he stepped down as CEO in 2014.

But becoming a billionaire was never his goal, he told the Smithsonian Institution. "When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich."

Now 70, Ellison has a lifestyle that he could only have dreamed of during his working-class Chicago childhood.

"This is all kind of surreal," he told Mike Wilson, the author of "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison.""I don't even believe it now. Not only did I not believe it when I was 14, but when I look around, I say, this must be something out of a dream."

Ellison collects cars and private jets, and has his own America's Cup sailing team. His incredible real-estate portfolio includes a private golf club in Rancho Mirage, California; a $70 million house in Silicon Valley; the former summer home of the Astor family in Newport, Rhode Island; a historic garden villa in Kyoto, Japan; and the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai. And because he loves basketball, he's installed courts on at least two of his yachts.

He has also given hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, particularly medical research and education. He also says that he plans to give billions more.

Clearly, he's proven his adoptive father wrong.

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Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav took home more than $150 million last year, making him the highest-paid chief executive in the US.

Each of the top-10 highest-paid CEOs of 2014 made more than $50 million, according to a new list from The New York Times. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the top 10 CEOs are men.

Executive compensation data firm Equilar compiled the 200-person list for The Times based on corporate filings.

Here's what the top 10 CEOs made in 2014:

1. David Zaslav, Discovery Communications — $156.1 million
2. Michael Fries, Liberty Global — $111.9 million
3. Mario Gabelli, Gamco Investors — $88.5 million
4. Satya Nadella, Microsoft — $84.3 million
5. Nick Woodman, GoPro — $77.4 million
6. Gregory Maffei, Liberty Media & Liberty Interactive — $73.8 million
7. Larry Ellison, Oracle — $67.3 million
8. Steve Mollenkopf, Qualcomm — $60.7 million
9. David Hamamoto, NorthStar Realty Finance — $60.3 million
10. Les Moonves, CBS — $54.4 million

SEE ALSO: The 5 highest paid female CEOs of 2014

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Larry Ellison, Oracle's billionaire cofounder and current CTO, is famous for his brash personality.

He's shown time and time again that he's willing to go to great lengths to win, both in business and in his extracurricular activities. 

We've rounded up the stories that best show how competitive Ellison really is. 

Ellison wants to be dominant in everything he does. On Oracle's competing with Microsoft to be the number one software company, Ellison told 60 Minutes in 2004, "We're in second place. We're trying to catch them. They're not making it easy ... They have a monopoly. We don't. Darn it."

Source: 60 Minutes

Ellison obsessed over beating Gates for years. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold told Vanity Fair in 1997: "I mean, the guy’s got six billion bucks. You’d think he wouldn’t be so dramatically obsessed that one guy in the Northwest is more successful. [With Larry] it’s just a mania."

Source: Vanity Fair

He led huge changes in the America's Cup sailing competition, moving away from standard catamarans to expensive, futuristic AC72s. The boats are 13 stories tall and reach speeds of up to 50 mph.

Source: Business Insider

Although Oracle whiffed on its fourth quarter, missing expectations on both revenue and profits in the quarter that is traditionally its strongest, Oracle's management was upbeat, almost deliriously so.

"We are delighted with this quarter," one of Oracle's CEOs, Safra Catz said on a quarterly conference call with analysts.

The reason: Oracle blew way past its own internal expectations for cloud computing sales.

Oracle gained $426 million of new cloud revenue, on an annual recurring revenue basis. Management had projected it would do $300 million in the quarter, Oracle's other CEO, Mark Hurd, said.

And these executives are happy because Oracle makes three times more money over the long run on cloud than they do on software, they say.

Catz explained that a $1 million software license deal will ultimately generate $3 million for Oracle because customers will pay for extended technical support.

But a $1 million cloud contract will ultimately generate $10 million for the company, because customers must pay for the software on subscription for as long as they want to use it.

The downside: the accounting is different. With a software sale, the whole $1 million can be shown as revenue immediately. With cloud, the $10 million is recognized only when it is billed.

So even though the cloud contract is worth more, as Oracle shifts its customers to the cloud, it can look like revenue is shrinking.

Big profits in cloud, too

Ellison explained that selling applications via the cloud is about equally profitable to selling a software license, too.

There are two profitable ways to sell apps via the cloud, Software-as-a-service, (SaaS) which delivers an Oracle application over the internet; or Platform-as-a-Service, (PaaS) which hosts custom applications that the customers develop themselves.

"On a $1 million deal of licensed software, you'll get about 20% [in support revenue] for two years, so you'll get a total of $3 million after the cost of sales. It's a very profitable business. Most of that $3 million after the cost of sales is profit," Ellison said.

"On a $1 million SaaS or PaaS deal, you don't get anything up front but you have to pay commissions. But a $1 million deal is worth 3 times as much," he said. "That $1 million turns into something less than $10 million in profits, say $9 million in profits, over the 10 year period of providing the service. It's a much better business for us in terms of revenue and the margins are about the same."

He's being a little grandiose for the sake of example. Oracle's overall operating margins (excluding extraordinary items) was 45% in 2015. But point taken all the same.

Oracle has another advantage in making cloud profitable, Catz points out: Oracle makes all the things it uses in its cloud, the hardware and the software.

It doesn't have to buy expensive hardware or software from others. So it is in some ways, the master of its own profit margins.

Hurd also pointed out that the cloud is allowing Oracle to reach brand new customers. Smaller companies can buy Oracle's software delivered as a cloud.

These same companies couldn't afford to buy it as a software, buy the  hardware to run it on, and hire the IT people to manage all that.

Investors were a little more cautious. Cloud computing is currently only 6% of Oracle's total sales in its fiscal 2015 (about $2.3 billion out of $38.2 billion in revenue). While Oracle says that all of its business are also growing, new software licenses were down 4% in constant currency for fiscal 2015. The stock was down over 6% in after hours trading.

Catz promised that the proof of the goodness of cloud will soon show up in Oracle's quarterly financial reports. Cloud revenue should grow sequentially from quarter to quarter, and be less dependent on seasonality, she said.

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Silicon Valley is known for its obsession with youth. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg once suggested that people over 30 shouldn't really work in tech startups because "young people are just smarter." 

These folks are bucking the trend.

Pulled from our recently published Silicon Valley 100 list, meet the elder statesmen and stateswomen of Silicon Valley.

SEE ALSO: The 18 coolest women in Silicon Valley

Nick Woodman, 40

Founder/CEO, GoPro

GoPro, the company that makes wearable sports cameras, priced its IPO at $24 a share when it went public in June. Woodman became a billionaire when his company went public, and his whole family became millionaires too. GoPro went public at a $2.6 billion valuation.

Marissa Mayer, 40

CEO, Yahoo

In September, Alibaba went public. Investors in Yahoo expected Alibaba's public value to send Yahoo’s stock soaring. But after Alibaba's debut, Yahoo's stock crashed.

Months later, Yahoo unveiled a plan to spin off its remaining 15% stake in Alibaba, tax-free, into a public, independent investment company called SpinCo. Yahoo shareholders would receive shares "distributed pro rata," which means they'd own shares in two companies.

Stewart Butterfield, 41

Cofounder/CEO, Slack

Slack is a workplace-communication app. Slack has group- and private-chat features and lets users share files and work collaboratively. Slack was originally an internal tool used by CEO Stewart Butterfield's team at Tiny Speck, the company that made the multiplayer game Glitch, but Butterfield decided to spin it out into its own product and company.

Slack's growth as an enterprise communication tool has been organic— it hasn't spent any money on marketing. It's one of the fastest-growing enterprise apps of all time. Slack recently confirmed that it raised $160 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. That means it more than doubled its value since October, when it raised $120 million at a $1.12 billion valuation.

Malibu's Carbon Beach has long been one of the most exclusive enclaves in the world.

With just 70 properties, the stretch of beach between the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Coast Highway is home to Hollywood elite and billionaire business tycoons, earning it the nickname "Billionaires' Beach."

But the sandy crescent isn't just for billionaires anymore. After a years-long fight, California will open a new path to allow the public to access the beach. It will be only the third such entrance to the 1.5-mile stretch of sand; residents have fought hard for decades to limit public access.

Keep scrolling to see some of the ultra-rich residents of "Billionaires' Beach."

Madeline Stone and Meredith Galante contributed to this story.

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The 21-mile tract of Pacific Coast shoreline that makes up Malibu is one of the most exclusive places in the world. But Carbon Beach, which extends for just over one mile along the coast, is even more elite, earning it the nickname "Billionaires' Beach."

Carbon Beach is comprised of around 70 private residences, which are owned by some of the biggest names in the entertainment business, along with tech titans, lawyers, and financiers. It's also home to the Malibu Beach Inn, a boutique hotel wih a popular oceanfront restaurant.

Music industry mogul David Geffen has been a longtime Carbon Beach resident, but he is reportedly trying to sell his compound for $100 million. Geffen was a leader in the fight against public beach access, but eventually opened a path near his home in exchange for a remodeling permit.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s on and off relationship makes for one of the most interesting storylines in Silicon Valley.

Ellison took Benioff under his wing and turned him into a star executive by the age of 26. But after spending 13 years at Oracle, Benioff launched his own company called Salesforce in 1999, becoming one of Oracle’s biggest rivals in the cloud software space.

The two love to trash talk each other’s company, often getting into public feuds over their businesses. But some argue they’re still good friends, and have great respect for each other.

Ellison is the fifth richest man in the world with a net worth of over $54 billion. Benioff is worth about $3.6 billion.

Here’s a summary of the epic 30-year love-hate relationship between the two business titans:

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Benioff started working at Oracle at age 23. He left a strong impression immediately, winning Oracle's Rookie of the Year award that year.

Three years later, Benioff became Oracle's youngest VP at the age of 26. By then, he was already a star executive, making over $300,000 a year.

During his 13 years at Oracle, Benioff became one of Ellison’s closest friends and most trusted lieutenant. Carlye Adler writes in Fortune, “They sailed to the Mediterranean on Ellison's yacht, visited Japan during cherry blossom season, spent Thanksgiving together, and even double-dated.”

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In 2012, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison — who stepped down from his position as CEO in September 2014 — bought a 97% stake in the Hawaiian island of Lanai for a reported $300 million. 

His enormous purchase includes pretty much everything on the island — small businesses like local restaurants, shops, and galleries, and large businesses like the two Four Seasons hotels on the island.

He owns two golf courses, the community swimming pool, the water company, and a cemetery. He also owns nearly a third of all of the island's housing. 

One thing he also now unexpectedly owns: about 400 feral cats. 

Buzzfeed recently published an in-depth look at these cats, residents of the Lanai Animal Rescue Center, a sanctuary and popular tourist destination on the west side of the island.

"They're the island's cats," founder Kathy Carroll said to Buzzfeed.

Many of the cats were rescued from the dump and other sites near the Four Seasons. About 30 cats have been adopted from the shelter since last summer. 

Buzzfeed notes that Ellison has not yet visited the cat shelter, though his love for cats is well known.

According to an anecdote in his 1997 biography, "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison (God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison)," Ellison's cat Clio died while he was away on a business trip. Ellison apparently insisted on having the cat buried under her favorite tree. 

Ellison's plans for Lanai are still rather mysterious, and the transition of ownership to the Oracle billionaire has been controversial among residents. In an attempt to woo locals, Pulama Lanai, Ellison's development company, has completed updates to Lanai City's swimming pool and movie theater. 

Ellison has previously said he wants to transform the island into a "laboratory for sustainability," complete with a solar power system, electric car infrastructure, and a seawater irrigation system for organic farms, according to Honolulu Magazine.  

SEE ALSO: Welcome to Lanai, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison's $300 million Hawaiian paradise

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A growing number of tech moguls are trying to solve their biggest problem yet: Aging. 

From reprogramming DNA to printing organs, some of Silicon Valley's most successful and wealthy leaders are investing in biomedical research and new technologies with hopes of discovering the secret to living longer. And their investments are beginning to move the needle, said Zoltan Istvan, futurist and transhumanist presidential candidate.  

"I think a lot of the most important work in longevity is coming from a handful of the billionaires," Istvan told Tech Insider. "There are approximately six or seven billionaires that are very interested in life extension and they are putting in $40, $50, $100 million out there every year or every few years into this stuff. It makes a big difference when you have these legendary figures saying 'Hey, we can do this.'”

Here's some of those billionaires investing in the anti-aging and longevity research and development. 

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Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is known for his early investment in Facebook, but now he is betting big on biotech. Thiel said that he believes anti-aging medicine is “structurally unexplored,” according to a report from MIT Technology Review.

“The way people deal with aging is a combination of acceptance and denial,” he told Technology Review in March. “They accept there is nothing they can do about it, and deny it’s going to happen to them.”

Thiel takes hormone growth daily and is planning to participate in cryonic freezing after his death, according to the Technology Review report.

The 47 year old isn’t accepting or denying it, though. He has invested heavily to try to fight death for the last several years. Back in 2006, he pledged $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, which is a non-profit group working on life extension by advancing tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Thiel has also heavily invested in biotech companies. Most of his investments in the space are made via his Thiel Foundation. But at least five investments — including the DNA laser printing company Cambrian Genomics and cancer drug developer Stem CentRx  — via his venture capital firm Founder Fund. He has also invested $17 million in Counsyl since 2011, which is a company that offers DNA screening.

Larry Ellison

The founder of Oracle has said that he wishes to live forever and is an avid financial supporter into anti-aging research.

The Ellison Medical Foundation, which according to its website “supports basic biomedical research on aging relevant to understanding lifespan development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities,”has donated about $430 million in grants to medical researchers since 1997, about 80% of which has been focused on anti-aging developments.

“Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?” Ellison told his biographer Mike Wilson in 2003.

Larry Page

The co-founder of Google and CEO of Alphabet, also founded Calico in 2013. Calico, which is short for California Life Company, focuses on anti-aging research. In 2014, the company announced it had an investment of $750 million from Google.

Since its launch, Calico has also entered into several partnerships with different organizations to help it cure aging.

Most recently, Calico announced in April it was teaming up with the Buck Institute for for Research on Aging, which is one of the largest independent anti-aging research organizations. In 2013, the group garnered some attention for using genetic mutations to increase the lifespan of earthworms to the human equivalent of 400 to 500 years.

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