In the early days of cloud computing, few critics were as dismissive as Oracle Corp. (NYSE:ORCL) co-founder and CEO, Larry Ellison, who dismissed the concept as "complete gibberish."
Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld in 2008, Ellison suggested cloud computing was little more than a marketing buzzword for technologies that already existed.
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“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do … Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" the Wall Street Journal quoted Ellison referencing the cloud.
At the time, Oracle was best known for its dominance in enterprise databases and on-premises software, and Ellison was skeptical that customers would entrust mission-critical operations to remote servers owned by someone else.
Fast forward to today, and the same man who mocked cloud computing has become one of its wealthiest beneficiaries.
Ellison, now the world's second-richest man behind Elon Musk, has overseen Oracle's massive pivot into cloud services and transformed the company into a major contender in the new cloud-driven economy.
Through its advanced Oracle Cloud offerings, the company supplies massive computing resources and storage capabilities essential for the large-scale training and deployment of AI models.
Oracle partners with firms at the forefront of AI innovation, enabling breakthroughs for pioneering organizations like OpenAI and Musk's xAI.
It is an ironic twist: the executive who once dismissed the cloud as nonsense is now supplying cloud services to power some of the most ambitious AI projects on Earth.
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