The most-watched billionaire on the planet has added a personal plot twist. After a run that put him atop real-time wealth trackers, Larry Ellison has quietly married for a fifth time—to Jolin Zhu, a University of Michigan graduate nearly half a century younger. The union wasn’t announced with a yacht-party photo or a red-carpet reveal. It slipped out when the University of Michigan’s NIL booster collective publicly thanked “Larry and his wife Jolin” for helping secure blue-chip quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood. That small line confirmed months of whispering—Ellison is married again.
A quiet fifth marriage, confirmed by a football thank-you
The reveal happened in late 2024 via Champions Circle, Michigan’s donor collective built for the NIL era—where players can profit from endorsements and where well-heeled supporters play visible roles in recruiting. In a routine show of gratitude for landing Underwood, the group referred to “Larry and his wife Jolin,” effectively outing a marriage that the couple kept out of the press. Neither Ellison nor Zhu has issued a statement. No date, no venue, no official photos.
The pairing itself isn’t new. Ellison and Zhu have been seen together going back to 2017–2018, including appearances at Indian Wells, the tennis tournament Ellison owns. Even so, Zhu has stayed off the usual billionaire social radar. People close to Ellison’s sailing world—where he’s spent decades competing and funding America’s Cup-winning teams—say she rarely shows up there. That choice tracks with how the marriage surfaced: not through yachting or tech circles, but through college football.
So who is she? Born in China, Zhu (who also goes by her Chinese name, Zhu Keren) moved to the United States, became a citizen, and studied at Bard College at Simon’s Rock before earning a bachelor’s in International Studies from the University of Michigan. Friends from her early schooling at Northeast Yucai Foreign Language School in Liaoning recall a family able to fund elite education. People who have worked around Ellison say she’s been engaged in the parts of his world that interest her—chief among them, Michigan football, where donor collectives, corporate backers, and alumni now mix in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Her presence in that space matters. NIL has rewritten the rules of college sports, and collectives like Champions Circle sit at the center of it, helping schools compete for top talent without crossing the lines regulators and conferences are still drawing. The thank-you to “Larry and his wife Jolin” signals that Zhu isn’t simply a private spouse; she’s a participant in how Ellison deploys influence and capital, especially in sports.
A personal history that tracks with Oracle’s rise
Ellison’s marriages read like mile markers along Oracle’s climb from scrappy database startup to a cloud-era heavyweight. He co-founded the company in 1977, rode government contracts in the early years, surfed waves of enterprise software growth, and later pivoted hard into cloud infrastructure as AI demands exploded. The wealth that came with Oracle’s stock has made him a fixture near the top of the global rich lists. That fortune funds a sprawling life: buying 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lāna‘i in 2012, backing America’s Cup campaigns, acquiring Indian Wells, building an aviation and yachting fleet, and bankrolling projects that blend lifestyle with business.
Inside that story sit five marriages—each appearing at a different stage of his ascent:
- 1967–1974: Adda Quinn. This was before Ellison became a tech titan. Money was tight, the hours were long, and the strain showed. They eventually split, with Quinn later pointing to finances as a core issue.
- 1977–1978: Nancy Wheeler Jenkins. A short marriage that ended just as Oracle began to find its footing. The footnote that haunts this one: she sold back her Oracle stake before its boom years.
- 1983–1986: Barbara Boothe. The marriage overlapped with Oracle’s go-go mid-’80s period. They had two children, David and Megan—who would go on to found Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, turning the Ellison name into a Hollywood brand as well.
- 2003–2010: Melanie Craft. A romance novelist whose wedding to Ellison came with an unmistakable Silicon Valley twist: Steve Jobs served as the photographer. The two men were close for decades, a friendship that framed Ellison’s image as the pirate king of tech.
- 2020s–present: Jolin Zhu. Long seen at his side, formally acknowledged only when a football collective let it slip. Little is known about the ceremony or timing.
Between the fourth and fifth marriages, Ellison dated Ukrainian model and activist Nikita Kahn for years. They were a steady presence on charity circuits and at Ellison’s restaurants and properties. By the late 2010s, the two were rarely seen together, and the relationship faded from public view as Zhu appeared more frequently in Ellison’s orbit. The exact handoff is fuzzy, and neither party has talked about it.
What’s different now is how deeply the new marriage seems plugged into his investments. Ellison has long fused personal passions and public bets—first sailing, then tennis, now college sports in the NIL era. Zhu’s alma mater provides a natural channel. And the Underwood episode shows how those connections can become visible, even when the principals prefer discretion.
It’s useful to remember how Ellison thinks about platform-building. He doesn’t just sponsor a sport; he buys the venue, funds the team, or reshapes the ecosystem. For sailing, that meant pouring resources into Oracle Team USA and helping steer America’s Cup technology toward foiling catamarans. For tennis, that meant transforming Indian Wells into a crown-jewel stop on the tour. With college football, ownership isn’t on the table, but influence is—through facilities, NIL ecosystems, and community projects that help a program compete at the highest level.
The age gap—Ellison is 81, Zhu is 33—gets attention, and it would even without the billions. What stands out in his case is the profile of his partners over time: women who are highly social, often entrepreneurial or creative, and comfortable around power. That pattern holds with Zhu, except she’s chosen a lower public profile. Friends say she’s present where she wants to be and absent where she doesn’t—no yacht decks, no sailing after-parties, but regular appearances at sports and campus-adjacent events.
Ellison’s money is the obvious backdrop. Recent market surges in AI infrastructure put Oracle in the slipstream of the biggest tech trend of the decade. As companies race to deploy large models, they need massive compute and data plumbing—exactly the market Oracle has chased by expanding its cloud footprint and touting wins with high-demand AI workloads. A spike in Oracle’s valuation is what nudged Ellison past rivals like Elon Musk on some trackers earlier this year. Wealth rankings move with markets, but the bigger arc is steady: Ellison has been in the top tier for years, and the AI cycle has reinforced that position.
That capital base lets him play a long game in sports and philanthropy. On Lāna‘i, he’s poured money into wellness ventures, farming, and infrastructure. In California, he’s backed medical research and education. In tennis, he’s pushed to make Indian Wells feel like a fifth slam. College football—America’s most-watched weekly sport—offers a different kind of leverage: cultural reach. If Zhu is a force behind the scenes at Michigan, expect their names to surface again around recruiting wins, facility upgrades, or NIL-driven campaigns.
Still, privacy is clearly the choice here. The marriage has no public timeline. There’s no record of a lavish ceremony splashed across social media. People familiar with Ellison’s security say keeping a tight circle has become a priority as his wealth and visibility grew. Low-key personal moves are part of that protocol. The Champions Circle mention wasn’t a plan; it was a slip.
What else is known about Zhu? Beyond her education and citizenship, very little by design. She avoids interviews, doesn’t chase brand deals, and hasn’t tried to spin up a foundation with her name on it. The Michigan tie gives her public footprint a clear lane. For a couple that spans cultures and generations, a shared project helps: the language of winning games is simple and universal.
For Ellison, these relationships have also overlapped with big professional moments. His second marriage ended right as Oracle’s early momentum built. His third coincided with the company’s hypergrowth and his children stepping into their own careers. His fourth marriage ran through the dot-com aftershocks and into the iPhone era, when his friendship with Jobs added a mythic layer to both men’s stories. With Zhu, the backdrop is AI, cloud scale, and the monetization of sports attention. Different era, same pattern: personal and professional moving in tandem.
There are open questions. Will the couple appear publicly at Michigan home games this fall? Will Ellison escalate giving tied to the program or the university at large? Does Zhu’s interest extend to women’s sports, where NIL has produced breakout stars and brand deals at a breathtaking pace? And will she become more visible at Indian Wells or other Ellison-backed events, or keep her selective presence?
People around Ellison stress that he’s comfortable letting interests evolve. He learned to fly and kept at it. He learned to sail and then changed the sport. He fell in love with tennis and made a desert tournament feel like a world championship. College football’s new era offers him a way to influence without owning. Zhu’s role could be to help him read that landscape: who to meet, where to spend, when to step back, and how to keep the couple’s privacy intact while backing winners.
One more thing: the confirmation-by-thank-you says a lot about how the ultra-wealthy operate now. In a world where nearly everything is public, the truly rich can still tuck away major life events. But they can’t always hide the consequences—like a collective’s social post linking a gift to a recruiting coup. The details leak through the places where money meets momentum.
For now, the facts are simple. Ellison is married to Zhu. They’ve kept it quiet. She’s American, China-born, Michigan-educated, and active in the NIL conversation. He’s the anchor tenant of the billionaire class, with a record of turning hobbies into headline projects. Watch the 50-yard line in Ann Arbor and the player lounge photos that follow. If history is a guide, that’s where this story will keep writing itself.
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