Larry Ellison holds tight to his Oracle shares. The 81-year-old co-founder owns roughly 41 percent of the company he built from scratch decades ago. That stake, around 1.16 billion shares as of mid-2025, has powered a fortune that briefly topped Elon Musk’s last year and still ranks among the world’s largest. Yet Ellison doesn’t sell. He borrows instead. SEC filings show he has pledged hundreds of millions of those shares as collateral for personal loans. One recent tally put pledged shares at 277 million. Their value exceeded $82 billion at the time. The approach lets him fund lavish spending and new ventures without diluting his control. Control matters. Now that grip faces fresh tests. Ellison and his family have plunged into Hollywood with the Paramount-Skydance combination and an audacious push for Warner Bros. Discovery. The latest move came in late May when the family privately vowed to limit debt at the enlarged media group. Bloomberg first reported the commitment on May 27, 2026.…