That's not the tone I get from the article at all. It starts that way to play up the difficulty of what he's trying to achieve and set it up so that the people it covers later seems even more gutsy and/or amazing for trying and/or achieving the goal.
In this case, the hero and focus of the article is not Ellison, but Stan Honey, the guy behind the new software system, and Ellison is just the force of nature that set the stage.
A lot of Wired features are written that way and there's very rarely any venom in it.
In this case even Ellison is painted relatively sympathetically, as the eccentric billionaire trying to do something slightly crazy but that might yet have a chance of success against really tough odds. It describes some problems he's run into, but it also cites people who see what he's done as positive.
NBC aired a race from Newport a month ago, and a similar round of articles circulated. does anybody remember all the 3D racecourses and SGI logos everywhere in 1992 america's cup? or all the wild Quokka webcoverage of the 95-98 stuff?
Don't let that stop you from writing 5000 words about it. This reeks of "pick someone to hate, find a reason to hate them, write it up".