Larry Ellison

It's surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn't feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.

Maui reminded me of San Diego: beautiful, but crowded.

We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.

Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.

Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.

Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.

We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.

Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.

A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.

We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don't decide for you.

What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people - ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.

It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.

Oracle's latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications.

They don't call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I'm no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.

I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.

Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.

To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, 'I'd like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?'

The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.

We'll continue to expand our footprint... Oracle's Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers.

Bill Gates wants people to think he's Edison, when he's really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn't right... wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence.

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build.

I believe people have to follow their dreams - I did.

Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.

I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

I'm in two modes when I'm on Lanai: In engineering mode, I'm trying to find the right place for the reservoir and the desalination plant, and looking at designs for new hotel rooms. The rest of the time, I'm in decompression mode. I'm on Hulopoe Beach, going for a swim, or on my paddleboard surrounded by 100 spinner dolphins.

What is Oracle? It's people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.