In January, two of the world's most powerful businessmen found themselves engaged in highly dramatic and very different law suits. Bill Gates was up to his neck in the US government's anti-trust suit against Microsoft. Larry Ellison, several places behind him in the world's rich list and a ferocious rival, had just brought a suit against the city authorities of San Jose.
The 55-year-old boss of Oracle, a database software company, was irritated by an air traffic control law that prevented him from flying his $38m Gulfstream jet over the city after 11.30pm. There could be no clearer divide in the profiles of the two men: the nerdy geek whose visions of world domination stemmed from a rumoured virility defecit, and the charismatic playboy with the bounty hunter profile and a taste for Top Gun military hardware.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal identified Larry Ellison as the world's richest man. The irony is that eclipsing Bill Gates is likely to make two people happy - the other one being the former world title holder himself. For Ellison, it is the realisation of his wildest dreams. For Gates, the Seattle-based mogul hated by Silicon Valley's platoon of "Anti-Bills", it's a relief from a burden he never sought.
It will also warm the hearts of millions of casual observers to whom Gates's famous combination of financial success and poor dress sense makes him a natural hate figure. Ellison is a more palatable plutocrat. He has the sort of wit and polish that, with his Bobby Ewing-style bouffant and taste in black turtle neck sweaters, casts him as the smooth operator in an industry full of social rejects. Ellison's favourite chat-up line - "Can I buy you a car?" - has seen him, in a good year, buy four $50,000 Acura sports models and goes some way towards explaining how he has come to marry and divorce three times.
The credit for the changeover in the fortunes of these two men should really go to the US Department of Justice. The DoJ's successful anti-trust suit against Microsoft has butchered Microsoft's share price, removing tens of billions of dollars from the value of Gates's shareholding, not to mention the collateral damage caused to other hi-tech stocks. Ellison, by contrast, has benefited hugely from a boom in the value of Oracle's shares, which have more than quadrupled in the past year. This has driven his paper fortune from about $6bn in 1997 to $13bn in September last year and - on Forbes magazine's rankings - to more than $50bn today.
Of more interest than the financial power shift, at least to those outside the IT industry, is the cultural shift. Ellison has cultivated an image for himself as one of Silicon Valley's most flamboyant characters. The poor hacks on the Gates beat have been limited to covering Bill's dandruff problem, whether or not he has cleaned his glasses, and his late mother's attempts to get him to change his clothes more often. Ellison, on the other hand, is described by his biographer, Mike Wilson, as "a one-man amusement park, Larryland" and promises far richer pickings.
Where Gates became known for flying cattle class with a blanket over his head, Ellison flies an SIAI-Marchetti S.211 fighter plane in which he is known to have conducted mock dog-fights over the Pacific, with his son David. He recently tried to import a decommissioned Russian MiG-29, but the US government said no way. "It's considered a firearm," said Ellison, incredulously, "even though that's not my intention. It is disarmed, but theoretically you could rearm it and take out a couple of cities."
Where Gates enjoys a round of golf and might take his young family sailing - he has, after all, a secluded lakeside house - Ellison skippers Sayonara, one of the world's fastest yachts and a recent winner at Cowes. In 1998, he won the disaster-struck Sydney-to-Hobart race, with Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan on board, while 80mph winds and 20ft waves devastated the fleet and three yachtsmen were killed.
Where Gates indulged in "virtual dating" (he and his girlfriend would go to see the same film in different cities and talk about it later over the phone Ellison has had a string of girlfriends and successfully fought off a sexual harassment suit. His accuser was eventually convicted of perjury.
And where Gates and Microsoft favour a Borg-like approach to business - they call it "embrace and extend", forgetting to add "assimilate" - Ellison sees himself as a samurai or a ninja warrior. He has been credited with using Genghis Khan's line, "It is not enough that we win; all others must lose", and an anonymous industry figure quoted in Time magazine said: "In every private conversation I've had with Larry over the past 15 or 20 years, the metaphors when he's speaking of competitors are always violent. He'll say, 'This is the quarter we put a knife in their chest', or, 'The life will be choked out of them.' The metaphors don't come from chess, and they don't come from the Bible. He sees this as personal combat."
It is an ethos he drums into his staff: Oracle salesmen were set a target of 100% growth per year and earned extra bonuses for getting their software installed over their rivals', whom Oracle tried to kill by targeting a different one each year: Cullinet, Hewlett-Packard, Ingres. In one promotion, they were even offered bags of gold - prompting Geoffrey Moore, author of Inside the Tornado, Silicon Valley's bible of hi-tech marketing, to use Oracle not only as an example of a "gorilla company", but to conclude that it taught the rest of the industry how badly they should behave.
Unsurprisingly for someone with the comic book persona of Larry Ellison, he came from humble beginnings, although not, perhaps, as humble as he has since made out.
Ellison was born in Manhattan to a young, unmarried mother from Russian Jewish immigrant stock: the adopted family name was, touchingly, derived from Ellis Island, where so many US immigrants were processed. "The truth," writes Mike Wilson, "was that Ellison did not grow up in a tenement, his family was not poor, and his neighbourhood was not rough - at least not while he was there. South Shore, along the shore of Lake Michigan, was once one of the south side's most desirable neighbourhoods."
He was, in fact, adopted by his mother's aunt, Lillian Ellison, and her husband Louis, an accountant. Like Gates, Ellison never finished his degree, though not for the same reasons. Gates went to Harvard and could clearly have done well, if he hadn't dropped out to co-found Microsoft. Ellison, however, seems to have been an undistinguished student who simply never got it together well enough to attend classes.
However, the pretence of studying led him to take "graveyard shifts" as a computer operator and a programmer, and he moved from Chicago to Silicon Valley, where he worked for Amdahl - a mainframe computer supplier that challenged IBM - and Ampex. And that's where he got his break.
Ampex was developing a giant database for the CIA, and Ellison was assigned to the project, along with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The CIA's codename for the project was Oracle. The project was something of a disaster, but it led eventually to the formation of Oracle Corporation and its current hugely successful range of databases. And in the same way that Apple based its Macintosh range of personal computers on original research done at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc), Oracle's hugely successful "relational databases" were inspired by an idea developed by IBM.
Microsoft got started in 1975 and Oracle in 1977, but the two companies grew at around the same rate, and went public in the same year. They could have been friends and partners, since they were on different sides of computing's great divide: Microsoft supplying the small personal or "client" side software and Oracle providing the giant corporate database or "server" side. Personal computers using Microsoft software calling up data from mainframes running Oracle databases: what could be more obvious than that?
But it would have been naive for Ellison to assume that Microsoft would stick to the client side of the divide, and it is currently attacking the low end of Oracle's business with its Windows 2000 corporate operating system and its own relational database. In Microsoft's idea of the universe, Microsoft should rightly own the software on both sides. Either way, it certainly didn't fit in with Ellison's ego to be "the other software billionaire".
His nose - broken while playing basketball - was figuratively put out of joint in March 1986 when Oracle's first stock offering gave Ellison a paper fortune of $93m. The next day, when Microsoft went public, Gates's holdings were worth more than $300m. The race was on. Ellison's tactics rely more on razzle than good ideas. He has an ear for the memorable (ie quotable) locution: his name was barely known outside the computer industry until he appeared on a conference platform with Gates in 1997 and attacked the PC as a "ridiculous device". PCs should be replaced by cheaper and simpler "network computers", he said, and it made headlines round the world.
Aol meanwhile, was dismissed as "Club Med on the Web". When Ellison appeared on Oprah, a reported 4,000 women wrote to him, many interested in marriage. Like most of Ellison's ideas, the network computer flopped, but his former speechwriter Dick Brass still likes to claim he helped turn Ellison from a corporate mismanager into a "philosopher king" - though it must be added that Brass now works for Microsoft.
Ellison was wrong about the success of massively parallel processing computers (though he invested his own money in the idea), wrong about the success of so-called video-on-demand (as Oracle found when it ran a pilot with British Telecom), wrong about network computers replacing PCs (or at least, there's no evidence yet), and wrong about several other things - though we might have to revise that view in 10 years and say he was right but too early. But he was absolutely right about the power and importance of the internet, which is currently fuelling the demand for large databases of the sort Oracle supplies, driving up Oracle's share price, and adding more billions to Ellison's paper fortune.
And however flaky Ellison may seem, he did start from more-or-less nothing, and he has become the world's richest man - or near enough as makes no difference. What's more, unlike poor nerdy Bill Gates, he seems to have enjoyed doing it.
