Welcome to Larry Ellison’s lifestyle of the rich and shameless

This week San Francisco achieved Peak Ellison; we may never see these levels again. It’s been all Larry, all the time here in the little town by the bay InfoWorld calls home. There’s nowhere to go from here but down, and possibly out.

First, of course, there was the Oracle OpenWorld show, which invaded the Moscone Center and several city blocks down the street. At the same time, the America’s Cup final — featuring Oracle Team USA — was playing out at the San Francisco Marina, a few miles away.

That contest took a dramatic turn when Ellison’s yachtsmen scored a stunning upset over Emirates Team New Zealand, thanks to hard work, pluck, determination, and roughly $100 million of Uncle Larry’s money.

Shortly before he was scheduled to deliver the OpenWorld keynote last Tuesday, the Big L blew off speaking to the assembled thousands so that he could watch his boat jibbing its way across the bay. As InfoWorld’s Caroline Craig notes:

The Oracle CEO’s no-show for Wednesday’s OpenWorld keynote speech, announced 45 minutes after he was supposed to appear on stage, predictably left attendees fuming and did little for Oracle’s customer relations. “While Oracle asks customers to prioritize its products over competitors, Ellison made the decision that racing, his passion and hobby, is more important than customers,” said analyst Michael Krigsman of consulting firm Asuret.

He’s a man of the people, that Larry. Of course, by “people,” I mean the ones who truly matter: billionaires.

Poseurs and hosers

In an oddly synchronous occurrence, the October 2013 issue of Vanity Fair served up a feature story about the high-tech gazillionaires who’ve descended upon the city’s Pacific Heights neighborhood like a pack of overprivileged and under-pedigreed mongrels. The article gushes about the excesses of the Grooveau Riche — Mark Pincus (Zynga), Jonathan Ive (Apple), Marc Beniof (Salesforce), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), and David Sacks (Yammer), to name a few — all of whom have bought mega-million-dollar mansions on the bluff overlooking Alcatraz. But it saved its very worst for Ellison, citing Trevor Traina, “San Francisco’s undisputed social king”:

The first tech giant to arrive was Oracle’s Larry Ellison, in 1988. He paid $3.9 million for the William Wurster house right next to the Gettys — a mere pittance for him, to be sure, and just one of his dozens of properties. “He ruffled every feather,” says Traina. “[Ellison] essentially became ‘the Wurster-minator.’ He tore out the entire house except for the courtyard, and then he built this very modern house. People were extremely upset.”

Ellison didn’t make any more friends when he raised hell about a neighbor’s redwoods that were obstructing his views of the bay and harming his property value, he said. He took the couple to court, and they ended up cutting the tops of the trees in the undisclosed settlement. Some bad blood followed Ellison to the Gold Coast when Nicola Miner — daughter of the Oracle co-founder Robert Miner, with whom Ellison had clashed — bought across the street from him and erected on the terrace a nine-foot robot sculpture which you can’t help but notice is male, due to the steel gas-pump nozzle and hose he has for a penis. It’s aimed directly at Ellison’s house.

My advice: If you plan to read the rest of that article, bring a vomit bag. No, wait, bring two vomit bags. It does tend to make one nostalgic for the good old days of the guillotine.

Clothing optional

In yet another, somewhat less tony part of town, the New Century Theater is suing Oracle, claiming that one of its employees ran up more than $33,000 in charges during last year’s Oracle OpenWorld, and now the company has refused to pay.

For those who’ve never been there, New Century is an establishment where fit young women wear very little clothing to begin with, then proceed to remove what’s left. According to SFGate:

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit.

New Century’s attorney David Cook wasn’t talking either, telling us only that the lawsuit speaks for itself. And maybe so does Cook’s email address: Cook@SqueezeBloodFromTurnip.com.

If the strippers were wearing sailor’s caps and Docksiders, I’m sure Larry would have had no problem footing the bill. Maybe New Century will also erect a statue and point it in Larry’s direction.

There’s something about Larry

Hey, when you’re worth $40 billion, you generally get to do what you want. I get that. But while Larry fiddles around with the sport that kings would play if only they had more money, Oracle burns. The database giant is falling behind Salesforce and friends in the race to own customers in the cloud, Bloomberg’s Aaron Ricadela reports:

While he’s seeking to convert customers to cloud computing and buying smaller companies to offer more business software, Ellison faces headwinds in technology spending that’s resulted in flat to negative sales growth in the last two fiscal quarters.

Last year, Big L tried to squeeze a few billion dollars out of Google in a patent dispute and got soundly spanked. As InfoWorld’s Paul Krill notes, “Java security” is still an oxymoron. And as Serdar Yegulalp writes, Oracle’s in-memory database is about to have its lunch money stolen by open source alternatives, then dangled from a school locker by its BVDs.

Can Team Oracle (the company) stage as dramatic a comeback as Oracle Team (the yachters)? Maybe, but I suspect that at age 69 Larry’s heart just isn’t in it any more.

Here’s a suggestion. Next year, instead of OpenWorld, Ellison should hold a conference for all of the former business partners, customers, neighbors, strippers, and ex-wives who are ticked off at him. I think he’ll need a bigger venue than Moscone, though — maybe Candlestick Park, preferably after its final demolition.