Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison (born August 17, 1944 in The Bronx, New York City, New York) is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, one of the world's leading enterprise software companies. As of 2012, he is the third wealthiest American citizen, with an estimated worth of $36 billion.The bulk of Ellison's fortune comes from his 22.5 percent stake in Oracle.
Larry Ellison was born in the Bronx, New York City, New York to Florence Spellman, an unwed 19-year-old of Jewish heritage and an Italian-American U.S. Air Force pilot, who was stationed abroad before Spellman realized that she had become pregnant by him. After Larry Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother determined that she was unable to care for him adequately, and arranged for him to be adopted by her aunt and uncle in Chicago. Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine months old. Lillian was the second wife of Louis Ellison, an immigrant who had arrived in the United States in 1905 from Russia. Larry Ellison did not meet his biological mother again until he was 48.
Ellison graduated from Eugene Field Elementary School on Chicago's north side in January, 1958 and attended Sullivan High School at least through the fall of 1959 before moving to South Shore.
Ellison grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago's South Shore middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Ellison remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, who adopted the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the USA, Ellis Island.Louis, his adoptive father, was a modest government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression.
Although Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive-parents, who attended synagogue regularly, he remained a religious sceptic. Ellison states: "While I think I am religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not dogmas I subscribe to. I don't believe that they are real. They're interesting stories. They're interesting mythology, and I certainly respect people who believe that believe these are literally true, but I don't...I see no evidence for this stuff." At age thirteen, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration.
Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, after not taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending a summer in Northern California, where he lived with his friend Chuck Weiss, Ellison attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer design. In 1964, at 20 years of age, he moved to Northern California permanently.
During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle".
Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's code. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2; there was no Oracle 1. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.
In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because it was losing money. This crisis, which almost resulted in Oracle's bankruptcy, came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also to settle out of court class action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison would later say that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."
Although IBM dominated the mainframe relational database market with its DB2 and SQL/DS database products, it delayed entering the market for a relational database on UNIX and Windows operating systems. This left the door open for Sybase, Oracle, and Informix (and eventually Microsoft) to dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers.
Around this time, Oracle fell behind Sybase. In 1990–1993, Sybase was the fastest growing database company and the database industry's darling vendor, but soon fell victim to its merger mania. Sybase's 1993 merger with Powersoft resulted in a loss of focus on its core database technology. In 1993, Sybase sold the rights to its database software running under the Windows operating system to Microsoft Corporation, which now markets it under the name "SQL Server."
In 1994, Informix Software overtook Sybase and became Oracle's most important rival. The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison was front page Silicon Valley news for three years. In April, 1997, Informix announced a major revenue shortfall and earnings restatements; Phil White eventually landed in jail, and Informix was absorbed by IBM in 2000. Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002, saying that he did not have the time to attend necessary formal board meetings.
Once Informix and Sybase were defeated, Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in the late 90s and IBM's acquisition of Informix Software in 2001 to complement their DB2 database. Today Oracle's main competition for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems is with IBM's DB2, and with Microsoft SQL Server (which only runs on Windows). IBM's DB2 still dominates the mainframe database market.
In April 2009, Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun Microsystems after a tug of war with IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The European Union approved the acquisition by Oracle of Sun Microsystems on January 21, 2010 and agreed that "Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products". The Sun acquisition also gave Oracle control of the popular MySQL open-source database, which Sun had acquired in 2008.
On August 9, 2010, Ellison denounced Hewlett-Packard's board for firing CEO Mark Hurd, writing: "The H.P. board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobsmany years ago." Ellison and Hurd are close personal friends – Hurd often plays tennis at Ellison's house. Then on September 6, Oracle hired Mark Hurd and made him Co-President alongside Safra A. Catz. Ellison retained the CEO position.
- 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. Barbara was a former receptionist at Relational Software Inc (RSI). They had two children, David and Megan. Both Megan and David were executive producers of the 2010 Coen Brothers film True Grit.
- Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, from 2003 to 2010. They married on 18 December 2003, at his Woodside estate. Ellison's late 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
Home
Ellison styled his estimated $110 million Woodside, California, estate after feudal Japanese architecture, complete with a man-made 2.3-acre (9,300 m2) lake and an extensive seismic retrofit(37°24′44.34″N 122°14′51.40″W). In 2004 and 2005, Ellison purchased more than 12 properties in Malibu, California, worth more than $180 million. The $65 million Ellison spent on five contiguous lots on Malibu's Carbon Beach was the most costly residential transaction in United States history until Ron Perelman sold his Palm Beach, Florida compound for $70 million later that same year. His entertainment system cost $1 million, and includes a rock concert-sized video projector at one end of a drained swimming pool, using the gaping hole as a giant subwoofer.
In early 2010 Ellison purchased the Astor's Beechwood Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island for $10.5 million. The property was the former summer home of the prominent Astor family.
In 2011 Ellison purchased the 249 acre Porcupine Creek Estate and private golf course in Rancho Mirage, CA for $42.9 million. The property was the former home of Yellowstone Club founders Edra and Tim Blixseth, sold to Ellison by creditors following their divorce and bankruptcy
In order to settle an insider trading lawsuit arising from Ellison's selling nearly $1 billion of Oracle stock, he was allowed to donate $100 million to his own charitable foundation without admitting wrongdoing. A California judge refused to allow Oracle to pay Ellison's legal fees of $24 million. Ellison's lawyer had argued that if Ellison were to pay those fees, that could be construed as an admission of guilt. Ellison's charitable donations to Stanford University raised questions about the independence of two Stanford professors who evaluated the case's merits for Oracle.
In response to the September 11th terrorist attacks, Ellison made a controversial offer to donate to the Federal government software that would enable it to build and run a national identification database and issue ID cards.
The 2004 Forbes list of the charitable donations made by the wealthiest 400 Americans stated that Ellison had donated $151,092,103 in the preceding year, about 1% of his estimated personal wealth.
In June 2006, Ellison announced that he would not honor his earlier pledge of $115 million to Harvard University, claiming it was due to the departure of former President Lawrence Summers. Oracle spokesman Bob Wynne announced, ``It was really Larry Summers' brainchild and once it looked like Larry Summers was leaving, Larry Ellison reconsidered... It was Larry Ellison and Larry Summers that had initially come up with this notion."
In August 2010 it was reported that Ellison is one of the 40 billionaires who has signed "The Giving Pledge". Ellison wrote: "Many years ago, I put virtually all of my assets into a trust with the intent of giving away at least 95 percent of my wealth to charitable causes. I have already given hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research and education, and I will give billions more over time. Until now, I have done this giving quietly—because I have long believed that charitable giving is a personal and private matter.
