Hours earlier, Ellison had put in a call to Marc Benioff, the co-founder and CEO of Salesforce. Benioff knows Ellison as well as anyone, having worked for him for 13 years before starting the cloud software company that's now a big competitor.

"It was awesome," Benioff said in a wide-ranging interview the next day, regarding his chat with Ellison.

Benioff spoke about his former boss's latest run of fortune.

"Larry really deeply wants this," Benioff said. "This is very important to him, that he is building a great company, what he believes is one of the most important companies in the world, and also, wealth is very important to him."