Larry Ellison thinks Michael Dell is 'brilliant' for buying EMC and will 'make billions personally'
Though he also says he's heartbroken that he can't snatch EMC away from Dell.
"I think it's brilliant. My friend Jim Davidson and my friend Michael Dell have done a spectacular job in engineering that EMC deal," Ellison said when a Wall Street analyst asked him about it on Thursday. (Davidson is a managing partner at private equity firm Silver Lake, the major financier of the $67 billion deal.)
"They are all going to make billions of dollars," Ellison said. "Michael is going to make billions personally. So hats off to them. Its a fabulous, fabulous deal."
Ellison made the comments during a Q&A with Wall Street analysts on Thursday, during Oracle's huge tech conference that took place this week in San Francisco.
He also said that he thought about trying to buy EMC and only rejected the idea because the timing wasn't right for Oracle.
"I can tell you, we're not bidding for EMC. But I shed more than a couple of tears. God we could make a lot of money, a LOT of money, if we bought EMC at that price."
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But EMC has "a huge installed base, it's going to throw off a whole lot of cash, it's going to be around for a long time and the people that own it are going to make a lot of money," he said. "So good job Michael and Jim."
But that doesn't mean that Oracle won't do its own EMC-like deal and buy a big, undervalued competitor when the time is right.
Analysts asked him what he plans to do with Oracle's stockpile of $56 billion in cash and he said, "We haven't made any large acquisitions for a while. You know? We're kind of saving our nickels and dimes. We might do something interesting, one of these days. Not anytime soon."