“All Others Must Lose”: Larry Ellison Once Spent Billions Taking on Bill Gates’s Microsoft, Even Paying Investigators to Dig in Trash

In the pantheon of tech rivalries, few battles have burned hotter or lasted longer than that between Oracle (ORCL) co-founder Larry Ellison and Microsoft (MSFT). What started as a simple competition for database dominance evolved into an all-out philosophical war — fueled by ambition, ego, and a hunger for total supremacy. Larry Ellison previously said “It’s not enough that we win; all others must lose.”

This quote, often cited as Ellison’s battle cry, perfectly captures the Oracle founder’s cutthroat view of competition — particularly when it came to his long-time nemesis, Bill Gates, and the behemoth he built in Redmond.