The epic 30-year love-hate relationship of billionaire CEOs Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff
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.”
In many ways, Benioff was similar to Ellison: tall, charismatic, technologically savvy, and a gifted speaker. As former Oracle president Ray Lane once said, "Marc would get people believing in his vision and supporting whatever project he wanted to do…That’s Larry…Marc’s one of Larry’s favorite children.”
In fact, the two were so close that there were all kinds of rumors about their relationship. "It's weird…People said I was related to Larry Ellison...that I was his nephew, or that Larry was my babysitter, or he mowed my parents' lawn,” Benioff told Fortune. NetSuite’s Zach Nelson said, “We heard that [Benioff] washed Larry’s car as a child.”
When Benioff first started building Salesforce in 1999, he was still working at Oracle. He says Ellison was always supportive of his outside endeavor, giving him permission to split work at Salesforce in the morning and at Oracle in the afternoons. Ellison even let Benioff take a 6 month sabbatical before starting Salesforce.
After 90 days of running Salesforce, Ellison suggested Benioff take a leave of absence from Oracle, even offering to have him back if Salesforce didn’t work out. “He was my mentor for more than a decade as well as a close friend,” Benioff wrote about Ellison in his book, “Behind the Cloud.”
Ellison even invested the first $2 million in Salesforce and joined its board of directors as well. He told Benioff not to take more than 3 people from Oracle to Salesforce when he left the company.
But their relationship took a quick turn in 2000 when Benioff found out that Oracle had secretly started its own CRM service that directly competed with Salesforce. Benioff wanted Ellison to leave Salesforce’s board immediately, but Ellison refused to quit. Ellison told Benioff, “It would be much cooler if you fired me.” (because that way Ellison would get to keep his Salesforce shares).
This created a lot of media buzz, which Benioff said was “the greatest thing that ever happened to us.” Ellison eventually resigned from Salesforce’s board, but Benioff let Ellison keep his stock and options. “I can say I’m the only person who fired Larry Ellison,” Benioff told Fortune.
Benioff still likes to call Ellison his mentor. One of the books Ellison urged Benioff to read is Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” Benioff once said, “We believe in ‘The Art of War’, in that we are trying to get our competitors to attack us with angry, virulent energy.”
Both Benioff and Ellison also have great interest in Zen Buddhism. “I’ve been in Zen monasteries meditating with Larry in Kyoto,” he once said.
For years, the two engaged in public spats, openly bashing each other’s companies. Ellison repeatedly played down the growth of Salesforce’s cloud software, dismissing it as hype and an “itty bitty application” mostly running on Oracle’s databases, while Benioff shrugged off Oracle’s software as “false cloud.”
Perhaps the peak point of their feud came in 2011 when Ellison booted Benioff from speaking at Oracle’s OpenWorld show at the last minute. It was perceived as Ellison’s way of humiliating Benioff for publicly making fun of his keynote speech and Oracle’s cloud product.
Benioff said he thinks Oracle booted him because they were afraid he'd give a more entertaining speech than Ellison, telling the Times: "You don’t have somebody over to your house to tell better jokes than you." Benioff ended up giving a speech at a nearby hotel instead.
But in 2013, peace broke out between the two when Oracle and Salesforce announced a strategic partnership. In what was one of the most surprising press conferences ever, Ellison and Benioff suddenly had only nice things to say about each other.
Benioff said during the call, “Oracle has been there with us when we have had problems. I also just wanted think Larry as well. (Oracle is) always there for us whenever we need them. They are a true partner, they've always been a true partner.”
Ellison said in response: "I'm looking forward to working with Marc and Salesforce for years to come, to tap on some of these exciting challenges and help the future arrived a little bit sooner than it otherwise would."
In a follow up interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, Benioff admitted, “He’s my mentor. He was our first investor and first board member. There is no one I’ve learned more from than Larry Ellison.”
But things have been devolving again recently, and the two appear to be back at it again. In a recent earnings call, Benioff slammed Oracle again, calling its “Fusion” applications “Confusion.”
It’s unclear what the real relationship between the two is truly like behind the scenes, but some of people who know both Ellison and Benioff say they still have great respect for each other.
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