Lawrence J. Ellison or Larry, as he is known, worked as the Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of the Oracle Corporation and is considered the 5th wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes with a net worth of 51.8 billion dollars!
His story is quite impressive as you will soon see and it starts with his birth in Bronx, New York on the date of August 17 1944. His mother was 19 years old at the time and when he contracted pneumonia, at nine months of age, she decided to give him to her aunt and uncle in Chicago since they were more experienced with small children and would offer him a better home. Up until the age of twelve he thought that the uncle and aunt were actually his parents.
The adoptive father lost his real estate business during the Great Depression and was working now as an auditor for the public housing authority. He and Lawrence often argued due to the young boy’s independent attitude but his adoptive mother would make it up with her warm nature. His biological mother would only see him again when he was 48.
After graduating the Eugene Field Elementary School in Park Ridge, Illinois, he went to Roger C. Sullivan High School until he moved to the South Shore of Chicago in 1959. He was raised as a Reform Jewish but he remained a skeptic and refused his bar mitzvah celebration at the age of thirteen.
He always had an affinity with mathematics and sciences, being named science student of the year at the University of Illinois but after the second year he didn’t manage to pass his exams, since his adoptive mother died in that period. This made him move to northern California for the summer and he attended the University of Chicago for one term, beginning to study computer design. At the age of 22 in 1966 he moved permanently to northern California.
At Berkeley, California, with the rudiments of programming he learned and only a few dollars in his pocket he moved from one job to the next, working as a technician or programmer for the eight years that would come. While he was at the Amdahl Corporation in 1977, he began to found his own company with the aid or two colleagues, Robert Miner and Ed Oates, calling it Software Development Laboratories (SDL). The investment took $2000 from which $1200 came from Larry’s pocket so he was the Chief Executive Officer from the beginning.
He discovered a text called “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” written by Edgar F. Codd and since his employers from IBM saw no commercial potential for a Structured Query Language it was dismissed, but Larry Ellison was things in a different light. The SDL won a two year contract for building a relational database management system with the codename Oracle and the project was created for the Central Intelligence Agency. They finished the work earlier by a year so they had extra time to develop their own system for different commercial applications and they renamed the company Relational Software Inc. in 1979.
If there were only eight employees in 1980, the following year IBM adopted Oracle for its mainframe systems and the company was rapidly becoming a billion dollar worth. This led to the renaming of the company into Oracle Corporation since this was the best-selling product and it went public in 1986. The early 1990s made them go through their first important losses when the market capitalization fell by 80%, really close to being bankrupt, so huge changes had to be done to make sure that the company would still live. The management side was separated from the professional elements and a new version of the database program named Oracle 7 came in 1992 that would make the company the leader in this kind of software, putting them back on the right tracks.
Ellison really likes his work, but he knows how to have a good time as well, being a fan of yachting, aviation, philanthropy and even had several cameo appearances in films like Iron Man 2. He was married and divorced four times, first to Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974, then to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978, with Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986 with who he had two children, David and Megan, and between 2003 and 2010 he was married to Melanie Craft with Steve Jobs as their official wedding photographer.
The outdoor activities like surfing or mountain biking had their toll and we went through a major surgery but he went on to race the Sayonara yacht with which he won the race between Sydney to Hobart in 1998. He is the main supporter of the BMW Oracle Racing team and his yacht Rising Sun is one of the largest private vessels in the world, being sold in 2010 to David Geffen. His aggressive investments got him the nickname “The Shark” but his passion for yachts made it fit even better.
The entire infrastructure of the world became dependent on the Oracle database programs, so the fortune of the company was skyrocketing and starting in 2004 Ellison began to buy a large number of companies worth over 25 billion dollars to integrate the competition into their midst and thus it became the largest business software company in the world.
On a parallel note, the year 2010 would be the one when he finally achieved victory in the America’s Cup Yacht Race. He joined the BMW Oracle crew in the two day competition and brought back in the country the 159-year-old America’s Cup, which returned home after a period of 15 years. The gauntlet was raised again in September 25, 2013 when the Oracle Team USA of Ellison defeated the Emirates Team New Zealand in San Francisco Bay, California.
He owns almost the entire Lanai Island in Hawaii, which is the sixth largest island in the archipelago, and his main home is in Woodside, California with an estimated worth of $110 million and a style that is reminiscent of feudal Japan. On the 18th of September 2014 Ellison announced that he would step down from the CEO to remain as executive chairman and CTO but is still the most important spokesperson of the company to this day.
