Larry Ellison

Cofounder and former CEO of Oracle

• Born: August 17, 1944
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Primary Company/Organization: Oracle

Introduction

Larry Ellison is the cofounder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Oracle Corporation, one of the largest providers of enterprise software. Enterprise software is sold to businesses, government agencies, and other organizations and differs from that sold to individuals. Originally dominant in the database market, Oracle grew in a variety of other areas, including computer hardware systems, development software, collaboration tools, and middleware. Known for his aggressive business practices, Ellison is viewed by many as a visionary and a reliable ally. Steady growth at Oracle permitted Ellison to become one of the most highly compensated business executives globally, and his luxurious lifestyle is not without its critics.

Early Life

Lawrence Joseph “Larry” Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in the Bronx, New York, to a single mother, Florence Spellman, who was only nineteen years old at the time of his birth. His mother was of Jewish heritage and his father was an Italian American. His father was a US Air Force pilot stationed abroad before Florence realized she was pregnant. When Ellison was nine months old, he caught pneumonia and his mother realized she was not able to take care of her child in the manner that would provide him with the best prospects. As a result, Florence arranged for Ellison to be adopted by his uncle and aunt, Louis and Lillian Spellman Ellison, in Chicago. Ellison's name was changed to Lawrence Joseph Ellison, and he was formally adopted by Louis and Lillian. Ellison would not meet his biological mother until he was forty-eight years old. Lillian, Louis's second wife, was considered a warm and loving caregiver. Louis, however, was remembered as cold, unsupportive, and often distant. He had immigrated in 1905 to the United States from Russia. Louis was a realtor who at one point owned his own real estate firm, although he lost this business during the Great Depression. Louis then became an auditor for the public housing authority.

Growing up, Ellison and his parents lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the south side of Chicago in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. As a child, Ellison was considered independent and at times rebellious. Ellison's rebelliousness sometimes extended to the point where he would clash with his father. This unruly streak has sometimes been attributed to Ellison's discovery at the age of twelve that he was adopted, but it might also have been an expression of his personality.

Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish household and regularly attended synagogue with his parents. However, he considered himself a religious skeptic even as a child. Ellison has stated that, while he considers himself religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not those to which he would subscribe. Rather, Ellison has indicated he considers the faith of his parents to comprise interesting stories and mythology. While Ellison has stated that he respects those individuals who believe these stories and myths are literally true, he personally sees no evidence for such beliefs. In keeping with this perspective, when Ellison turned thirteen, he declined the opportunity to be bar mitzvahed.

As a child, Ellison also demonstrated talent at tasks involving mathematics and science. He attended Eugene Field Elementary School and then moved on to Sullivan High School before transferring to South Shore High School in 1959. After graduating from South Shore High School, Ellison was accepted into the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ellison enjoyed initial success at Illinois and was named science student of the year at the completion of his first year at the university. Unfortunately, after Ellison's second year (but before he took his final examinations), his adoptive mother died, prompting his immediate departure for home. As a result of Lillian's death, Ellison decided to leave school and spent that summer in Northern California. While in California, Ellison lived with his friend Chuck Weiss, who was later to join Oracle as one of its first twenty-five employees. After the summer, Ellison enrolled in the University of Chicago for one term, after which he dropped out and returned to California. While at the University of Chicago, Ellison was first exposed to the then nascent field of computer programming. Although he was only twenty when he left Chicago, Ellison would never again live at home.

Life's Work

After his sudden move to California, Ellison's adoptive father expressed to him his belief that Ellison would never be successful and would ultimately end up a failure. However, Ellison had learned enough computer programming in Chicago to believe that he would be successful in this new field. Moving first to Berkeley, California, Ellison had only enough money with him for a little food and a couple tanks of gasoline for his car. Despite his confidence that he could succeed as a computer programmer, Ellison bounced from job to job for the next several years, even working for a short time at Wells Fargo Bank. During the early 1970s, Ellison worked as a programmer at Amdahl Corporation, and while there he helped build the first mainframe systems compatible with those sold by the dominant supplier at the time, International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation. While at Amdahl, Ellison learned that although it was quite possible to develop hardware and software that were less expensive than those sold by IBM, customers were reluctant to deviate from the market leader unless the alternative was clearly superior. Ellison soon moved to the Ampex Corporation, which specialized in audio and video tape equipment and data storage solutions. While at Ampex, Ellison was assigned to develop a database for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a client of Ampex. Although the development of the database was a relatively minor project, Ellison deeply enjoyed it, and he dubbed it Oracle.

Although as a student Ellison had been criticized for his impatience, this trait proved advantageous to him as an entrepreneur. In 1977, Ellison and two colleagues, Robert Miller and Ed Oates, started a company named Software Development Laboratories, Inc. (SDL). At about this time Ellison came across a paper, written by Edgar F. Codd, titled “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.” This became their basis of Oracle's primary product, the relational databases. Codd, who was employed by IBM, suggested that by using a series of formally defined tables, database programs could provide users with easy and quick access to data. Although Codd's employers saw no future in the concept of structured query language (SQL), Ellison did. As a result, Ellison invested $2,000 as start-up capital for SDL, which two years later was renamed Relational Software, Inc. (RSI). Using contacts he had made while working for Ampex, Ellison secured a two-year contract for RSI to make a database for the CIA, again code-named Oracle. Although Ellison wanted Oracle to be compatible with IBM's database, System R, IBM refused to share the code for that program, requiring Oracle to devise its own product based on Codd's theories.

In July 1979, RSI sold its initial release of Oracle 2 to the CIA for use at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where it ran on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 computers. Although the first version of the product was named Oracle 2, there never was a version named Oracle 1. Ellison had decided to use Oracle 2 to suggest that the software was in its second release and “bugs” present in the initial version had been eliminated. Early employees at RSI became accustomed to doing things “the Ellison way,” which resulted in the initial release of Oracle a year early. This permitted RSI to spend the second year devising a commercial version of the software for sale to the public. The success of Oracle with both the CIA and the public led RSI to double its sales for the first several years it was in business. Competitor IBM even adopted the Oracle software for its own use. Based on the popularity of the company's signature product, Ellison in 1982 again changed the organization's name, this time to Oracle Systems Corporation. He helped lead Oracle in making its products available for Unix and Windows users, which would greatly boost sales. Throughout the 1980s, Oracle grew until it saw annual sales of nearly $600 million per year.

Despite this, Oracle nearly was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1990 as the result of accounting irregularities resulting from salespeople who booked sales when they were made rather than upon delivery; hence, if sales were later canceled, Oracle had to restate its sales and profit figures, downgrading them from the figures previously issued. The losses Oracle incurred forced it to lay off 10 percent of its workforce. To prevent such an incident from recurring, Ellison revamped Oracle's accounting procedures and brought in experienced executives as president and chief operating officer to help manage operations, although he remained as CEO.

With new management leadership in place, Ellison was able to focus his energy on the development side of the business. In 1992, Ellison announced the release of Oracle 7, which put Oracle at the forefront of database management software. During this period, Oracle's stock price recovered to surpass its 1990 height and profits reached record levels. Still, Oracle continued to face challenges from IBM, Informix, and Sybase, which all threatened to overtake Oracle in the database software market. Ellison managed Oracle's challenges from these rival database developers. For example, when Sybase, which briefly became the market leader, merged with Powersoft, many thought the resulting combination would become even more powerful. Instead, Sybase shifted its primary focus from core database technology. As a result, Sybase sold rights to its database, running under the Windows operating system, to Microsoft. As a result, Oracle once again rose to prominence in the database software industry. Similarly, when Informix was growing exponentially during the mid-1990s, Ellison remained calm and promoted the development of additional features in Oracle, which soared in market share when it became known that Informix had misstated its profit and loss.

In 2009, Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, Inc., which gave Oracle control over the open source database MySQL. Oracle remained the market leader in database software, although it continued to face challenges from Microsoft and IBM.

Ellison stepped down as CEO of Oracle in 2014, but he stayed with the company as chief technology officer and chairman. In 2018, he joined the board of Elon Musk's company Tesla. He left Tesla's board in 2022, but still owns about 15 million shares in the company. As of March 2024, Ellison owned about 40 percent of Oracle and was the fifth-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $142 billion.

Personal Life

Ellison has been married and divorced four times. In 1967, Ellison married his girlfriend, Adda Quinn; the marriage lasted seven years and ended in divorce in 1974. In 1977, about the same time he founded SDL, Ellison married Nancy Wheeler Jenkins; this marriage also ended in divorce, a year after. Ellison was married to his third wife, Barbara Boothe, from 1983 to 1986, a union that resulted in two children. Finally, Ellison was married to romance novelist Melanie Craft from 2003 until 2010. Ellison was close friends with founder of Apple Steve Jobs, as well as other leaders in the technology field.

Ellison is well known for his love of the outdoors, a passion that has sometimes resulted in his sustaining bodily injuries. He owned the Rising Sun, the eighth-largest yacht in the world, until he sold it to film producer David Geffen in 2010. Ellison has been involved with the America's Cup races as a challenger and, in 2010, as the sponsor of the winning BMW Oracle team. Ellison has also practiced aerobatics with private jets and fighter planes he owned. A lover of exotic automobiles, Ellison owns several, including an Audi R8 and a McLaren F1. An aficionado of Japanese culture, Ellison built his $110 million home in Woodside, California, to resemble a feudal Japanese encampment. In 2012, Ellison also spent more than $300 million to buy the Island of Lanai, the sixth-largest island of the Hawaiian chain. He moved to the island permanently in 2020.

Bibliography

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Sharf, Samantha. "Irreplaceable? Larry Ellison Steps Down From CEO Position at Oracle" Forbes. Forbes.com, 18 Sept. 2014. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

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Wilson, M. The Difference between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison.” New York: HarperBusiness, 2003. Print.