Larry Ellison

Childhood & Early Life

Larry Ellison was born August 17, 1944 in New York City to an unmarried teen mother of Jewish heritage. He developed pneumonia when he was 9 months old, which is why his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption.

He was brought up on the south side of New York City and did not know until 12 that he was adopted. He attended the Eugene Field Elementary School in Chicago and later went to Sullivan High School.

His adoptive father, Louis Ellison, had a small real estate business in Chicago but lost all of that during the Great Depression. Young Ellison did not go along very well with him as he was distant and unaccommodating.

Although Ellison was raised in a religious household and often attended synagogue but he grew up to become a religious skeptic who did not believe in the conventional religious dogmas. He refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration when he was 13.

Ellison enrolled at the University of Illinois but dropped out of college when his adoptive mother passed away.

Larry Ellison in childhood

Career

In 1966 Larry briefly attended the University of Chicago.He went to California and spent the next several years as a computer programmer for various companies. Beginning in 1973, he worked at the electronics company Ampex, where he met fellow programmer Ed Oates and was supervised by Bob Miner. Ellison left Ampex in 1976 and later joined Precision Instruments (later Omex), where he was vice president of research and development.

In 1977 Ellison joined with Miner and Oates to form Software Development Laboratories (SDL), which was created to do contract programming for other companies.Ellison wanted SDL to do more. Inspired by a research paper written by British-born computer scientist Edgar F. Codd that outlined a relational database model, Ellison and his colleagues saw commercial potential in the approach, which organized large amounts of data in a way that allowed for efficient storage and quick retrieval.

Ellison, Miner, and Oates set to work developing and marketing a program based on Codd’s data-management theory. They received a contract from the Central Intelligence Agency to develop a database, and they began working on a commercial relational database program.

In 1979 the company (now called Relational Software, Inc.) released Oracle, the earliest commercial relational database program to use Structured Query Language (SQL), and the versatile database program quickly became popular.

Known for innovation and aggressive marketing, the company, renamed Oracle Systems Corporation (later Oracle Corporation) in 1982 after its flagship product, grew rapidly throughout the 1980s, going public in 1986. In 1987 Oracle became the largest database-management company in the world.However, in 1990 an internal audit conducted in the wake of a shareholder’s lawsuit revealed that Oracle had overstated its earnings, and the company’s stock plunged dramatically. Ellison restructured Oracle’s management, and by the end of 1992 the company had returned to financial health.

In the mid-1990s Ellison saw an opportunity to compete with Microsoft Corporation by developing a cheap alternative to the desktop personal computer (PC) called the Network Computer (NC). The NC was not as fully equipped as a standard PC and relied on computer servers for its data and software in an early version of what later became known as cloud computing. However, both the continued fall in PC prices and delays in the NC’s development meant that PCs running the Microsoft Windows operating system continued to dominate business users’ desktops. Ellison later admitted that the NC was technologically premature.

Ellison had more success with his early embrace of the Internet. Oracle developed products that were compatible with World Wide Web technologies, which helped the company to grow. In the early 2000s Ellison started Oracle on an aggressive strategy of buying rival software companies. Dozens of acquisitions were made, including multibillion-dollar purchases of PeopleSoft (2005), Siebel (2006), BEA (2008), and Sun Microsystems (2010).

Ellison was one of Silicon Valley’s most divisive figures, being both admired for his great success and deplored for his sometimes ruthless business methods and his conspicuous consumption. He was an avid yachtsman who founded a team that won the prestigious America’s Cup in 2010. In 2012 Ellison bought 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. That year it was estimated that his personal fortune was worth about $40 billion, making him the sixth richest person in the world and the third richest American (after Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett). In September 2014 Ellison stepped down as CEO of Oracle, though he remained involved with the company, serving as executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Personal life

Ellison has been married and divorced four times.

Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974.

Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978. They married six months before Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories. In 1978, the couple divorced. Wheeler gave up any claim on her husband's company for $500.

Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986. Boothe was a former receptionist at Relational Software Inc. (RSI).They had two children, David and Megan, who are film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively.

Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, from 2003 to 2010. They married on December 18, 2003, at his Woodside estate. Ellison's friend Steve Jobs, former CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., was the official wedding photographer, and Representative Tom Lantos officiated. They divorced in 2010.

Awards & Achievements

Ellison's yacht USA 17 won the second race of the 33rd America's Cup. He and his BMW Oracle team returned to America from Spain in 2010 with the title, for the first time in more than a decade.

Trivia

This famous IT entrepreneur and co-founder of a renowned IT company made a cameo appearance in the movie ‘Iron Man 2’ in 2010.

Larry Ellison is a philanthropist and continues to donate for charitable causes. He is one of the 40 billionaires who have signed "The Giving Pledge". The Giving Pledge is an organisation founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet which encourages the wealthy people of the world to contribute their wealth to philanthropic causes.