You said Ellison's opinion is given a moment later but that part you quote isn't about the Japanese executive's story. It's about something said by Jack Welch:

Jack Welch over at General Electric: "If you're not one or two in the market, you don't make money. The market leaders make the money." You know, you have to have share. You have to have substantial market share in order to be profitable in most businesses. The Japanese recognize this very, very clearly. And not just the Japanese. The great business leaders in the United States are the same, whether it is the old guard--and Jack Welch forgive me for calling you the old guard--or the young guard like Bill Gates. And we certainly believe that that is absolutely correct, that we have to pursuit market share. Today we have more share than all of our competitors combined. And our primary goal is to improve our share, our market share.

Still at least you provided a source. The actual full quote is Ellison saying that he was told this story by a Japanese business executive, and when he repeated this story to a New York Times journalist they took it totally out of context and made it sound like it was him saying it. He even says he's got in trouble for repeating this story before, but it's OK here because it's on video and therefore hard to take out of context! But on HN that's no obstacle apparently.

DM: Going back to Japanese culture, one of the quintessential elements of the Japanese approach to competition has been the aggressive pursuit of market share. Was your aggressive pursuit of market share early on something you learned, or was it just the natural outcome of heads-up business?

LE: No. I think it was absolutely our primary goal. I was always influenced by Japanese business people. In fact, it was a very famous story that I've gotten in a lot of trouble for, and I'm very hesitant to mention here, but I will, because at least it's on video and it's harder to take things on video out of context. But I was in Japan and I was talking to a Japanese business executive. And he told me that the problem with America is that we just have no stomach for competition. And I was defending America. I was defending my country and my culture. I said, "What do you mean? America, at the turn of the century was the leading edgeI mean, we were the laboratory, you know, for free market economics. The industrial revolution reached its zenith in the Eastern States of North America. What do you mean?" And he says to me, "Don't tell me about things that happened almost 100 years ago. Let's talk about today. You listen to your business executives and they say things like, Well, we have great respect for our competition; the market is very large; there is room for all of us to compete."

"In Japan, you know, that would be sacrilege," he said. "In Japan, we believe our competitors are stealing the rice out of the mouths of our children. In Japan, we think anything less than 100 percent market share is not enough. In Japan, we believe it is--and this is a quote that supposedly came from Genghis Khan, but I have heard it attributed La Rochefoucauld and other people--it is not sufficient that I succeed; everyone else must fail. We believe that this is not sufficient. We must destroy our competition.

And I remember I came back with that story and told it to people at Oracle. And I remember telling a New York Times reporter this story. And the New York Times reporter had a huge picture of me, took the whole thing out of context. It said, Larry Ellison, quote, "It's not sufficient that I succeed; everyone else must fail." With a huge picture. Then I started getting hate mail. (Laughter) I mean, this story stuck with me for a long time.