Larry Ellison's enemies were gleefully talking trash last week. Reports were rampant that Ellison, the flamboyant CEO of softwaremaker Oracle, had hired private investigators to peruse the garbage of groups defending his archrival Microsoft in its antitrust case. Reporters descended on Larryland, as the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., campus is called, anticipating Larrygate.
But Ellison resolutely refused to see the revelations as scandalous. He readily admitted that Dumpster diving had its disadvantages. "Some of the things our investigator did may have been unsavory," he said. "Certainly from a personal-hygiene point they were. I mean, garbage--yuck."
But unethical? Ellison begged to differ. His investigators had uncovered evidence that Microsoft was secretly funding "front groups" in order to manipulate public opinion in its favor, he contended. Probing those activities was, Ellison insisted, a "civic duty." He has taken to calling Gates a "convicted monopolist."
Oracle's cloak-and-dagger tactics against its despised enemy Microsoft and its allies--not to mention Ellison's brazen defense of them--left the targets fuming. "They've set new standards for hypocrisy and disingenuousness, even for Oracle," says Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray. The Association for Competitive Technology, one of the organizations Oracle snooped, alleged that spies tried to buy its garbage. Other groups are saying that laptops with information relating to Microsoft were swiped from their offices.
Silicon Valley, meanwhile, was loving it all. Larry watching is a big-time sport in Northern California. And Ellison's latest escapade incorporated all the traits that make him so compulsively watchable: ruthless competitiveness ("It's not enough that we win; all others must lose," he has said, paraphrasing Genghis Khan); love of the spotlight (a biography of him by Mike Wilson is titled The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison); a preternatural obsession with Microsoft and Gates; and a management style that sometimes has an inmates-running-the-asylum feel. "This was precisely the kind of goofy thing Larry might dream up," says biographer Wilson. "It struck me as rather out of character for the company. [Oracle president] Ray Lane must have been on vacation." If he wasn't, he is now. Lane resigned late Friday, though the company says his resignation had nothing to do with the intrigues.
Dumpstergate has its roots in the rivalry--by all accounts, one-sided--between Ellison and Gates. The world's two richest men have a lot in common. They're both college dropouts who started software companies in 1977. And they both became multibillionaires. But the rakish Ellison cuts a far different figure from the wonky Gates. Thrice divorced, Ellison has a taste for Armani, fast cars and faster planes--he once tried to buy a $20 million Russian MiG.