I was vehemently against acquisitions. Now let's buy everything in sight. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. We are a little more strategic than that. But everything was on sale.

It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.

What can a sales person say to somebody to get them to buy a product that they already use every day if they don't like it? Nothing.

Being first is more important to me [than earning money]. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it's just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don't need more money.

I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

Bill Gates wants people to think he's Edison, when he's really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn't right... wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence.