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No one has more to say about almost everything than Oracle (ORCL) founder Larry Ellison. And this was Larry Week in San Francisco, as thousands of Oracle partners and customers descended on San Francisco, clogging the streets around the Moscone Convention Center for the annual extravaganza that is Oracle Open World, the company’s giant user event.

Ellison, the company’s executive chairman and chief technology officer, and one of the richest people on Earth, has become even more important to Oracle’s day-to-day operations recently, given the recent announcement that co-CEO Mark Hurd is taking time off to deal with a medical issue.

In connection with the conference, Oracle assembles a group of entrepreneurs the company supports under a program called Oracle for Startups. Unlike Intel, Alphabet, Salesforce.com, and other companies that have venture arms, Oracle doesn’t provide new companies with capital. Instead, the company offers sharply discounted access to Oracle’s cloud-based software and introductions to Oracle’s vast client base.

Oracle invited a small group of entrepreneurs to an event on Wednesday afternoon at Ellison’s house in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. The house features impressive modern art and an astonishing view of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz.

I joined the group as Ellison held court on many topics, only a handful of which were about entrepreneurship. Mostly it was about Ellison, his company, his friends, and his enemies. He reminisced with obvious pleasure about the company’s early days, winning the database market over rivals Ingres, Informix, Sybase, effectively pushing IBM out of the market, and beating Microsoft.

There were ground rules. For starters, Ellison apparently doesn’t like people scuffing his floors; attendees had to exchange their shoes at the door for slippers. The event was on the record, but questions were limited to the entrepreneurs. (Not me, in other words.)

Ellison, wearing a black V-neck sweater and jeans, looks remarkably fit at 75. During the talk he perched on a tall director’s chair in front of a fireplace, with some of the entrepreneurs on couches and the rest standing in a semicircle.

Here are excerpts from the conversation:

On friends:

Ellison talks a lot about his friends, most of them household names. He mentions that for 25 years the late Steve Jobs was his best friend. Now he’s close with Tesla (TSLA) founder Elon Musk, and sits on the Tesla board. During the hour or so that he spoke, Ellison spent almost as much time talking about Tesla as Oracle. He also mentioned that he’s tight with Bill Clinton, asserting that he was one of Clinton’s largest supporters both when he was governor of Arkansas and when he was in the White House. He also cites his close friendship with SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, though he has a few criticisms about his investment strategy. More on that below.

On Elon Musk:

Ellison noted that his friend Elon Musk gets criticized in part for being frank—something they have in common. “When he thinks people are stupid he tells them they are stupid. People do not like to feel stupid.” He said that he told Musk, “Don’t make fun of the SEC.” Ellison, who has a long history of attacking his enemies, said that while you get a few moments of satisfaction from mocking someone in a public way, the satisfaction quickly evaporates. “And then you’re in court.”

Ellison went on to note that “in my youth, I said some ridiculous things just to piss everyone off.” And then he offered a famous example, of how during Oracle’s battle to buy PeopleSoft, he remarked that if he had one bullet and saw PeopleSoft’s CEO with his dog, he certainly wouldn’t shoot the dog. “I was a smartass. You get cheap thrills, and it’s really not worth it.”

On the Green New Deal:

“My idea is that entrepreneurship will deliver the Green New Deal,” he said during a lengthy discussion of both Tesla and government subsidies for electric cars. He said that federal rebates are disappearing for Tesla purchases, but that “you can still get rebates for electric Buicks—but no one wants to buy an electric Buick.” Ellison asserted that the structure of government incentives for electric vehicles punishes successful companies while incentivizing purchases from less successful players.

On priorities in autonomous driving:

Ellison repeatedly asserted that Tesla could roll out a ride-sharing service with autonomous cars priced two-thirds below what Uber (UBER) charges, while ensuring people arrive at their destinations safely. He noted how remarkable it is that the Federal Aviation Administration can ground the Boeing 737 Max, in which two accidents killed a few hundred people, while human-driven cars kill 30,000 people a year and not much changes.

“We can save tens of thousands of lives in this country,” with autonomous cars, he said, adding that drivers are even worse in other places. “Go to Rome.” (He then shared an anecdote about a taxi ride along Italy’s Amalfi Coast with Steve Jobs in which he was convinced the driver was going to go off a cliff.)

On the value of WeWork and Uber:

Ellison emphasized that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is a close friend. But he thinks that WeWork and Uber —two of the largest positions in the SoftBank Vision Fund—are “almost worthless.” He said Uber raises capital to gain market share, but that the business they secure is not sticky. He noted that Uber doesn’t own its cars, doesn’t control their drivers, and “they have an app my cat could have written.”

Ellison added that losing money to gain market share is “idiotic” if customers aren’t sticky. “They have nothing. No technology. And no loyalty.”

On WeWork, he mocked the company’s assertion that it’s a technology company. Ellison said, “WeWork rents a building from me, and breaks it up, and then rents it. They say, ‘We’re a technology company, and we want a tech multiple.’ It’s bizarre.”

(WeWork declined to comment on Ellison’s remarks. Uber didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

On dominating the world of financial management software:

Ellison said that Oracle is dominating the market for cloud-based enterprise resource planning software, with over 25,000 customers. The software helps companies manage their operations. He said that the No. 2 player has just a couple of hundred customers. “There tends to be extreme monopolies in our industry,” he said, pointing to the dominant positions of Facebook and Google. “There’s no other scaled ERP system on Earth.”

Ellison noted that in the data-center generation of ERP software, SAP was the leader, with Oracle behind. But Ellison said that’s switched, and added that “there is nothing they can do to stop us from getting virtually all of their customers. They totally screwed that up,” by which he means the shift to cloud and away from data-center based computing. And he added that Oracle expects to keep its dominant position in database software. “We do secure data management better than anyone.”

On the importance of artificial intelligence:

“Machine learning may be the most important new technology of the last 10 years” he said, and it’s playing an important role in Oracle’s own autonomous database product. Without AI, he said, it wouldn’t be autonomous. “It may be one of the most important computer technologies ever.” He said he agrees with Musk’s view that if there were sentient robots the logical thing to for them to do would be to kill off their only real competitors, i.e., us.

Earlier in the afternoon, Ellison had made the point that the same regulators who are scrutinizing autonomous driving would likely have felt the same way about the invention of fire—too dangerous. Is AI dangerous? “Probably,” Ellison said with a grin. “More dangerous than fire.”

Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com