Larry Ellison

Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and investor who is the co-founder, executive chairman, chief technology officer (CTO) and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Oracle Corporation. As of January 2022, he was listed by ''Bloomberg Billionaires Index'' as the ninth-wealthiest person in the United States and is the tenth-wealthiest in the world, with a fortune of $108 billion, increased from $57.3 billion in 2018. He is also the owner of the 43rd largest island in the United States,

Lanai

in the Hawaiian Islands with a population of just over 3200.

Early life and education

Larry Ellison was born in New York City, to an unwed

Jewish

mother. His biological father was an Italian-American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison contracted

pneumonia

at the age of nine months, his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption. He did not meet his biological mother again until he was 48.

Ellison moved to Chicago's South Shore, then a middle-class neighborhood. He remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, who had chosen the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the United States,

Ellis Island

. Louis Ellison was a 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 skeptic. At age thirteen, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration. 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 these are literally true, but I don't. I see no evidence for this stuff." Ellison says that his fondness for Israel is not connected to religious sentiments, but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis in the technology sector.

Ellison attended South Shore High School in Chicago and later was admitted to University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was enrolled as a premed student. At the university, he was named science student of the year. He withdrew without taking final exams after his sophomore year, because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending the summer of 1966 in California, he then attended the University of Chicago for one term, studying

physics

and mathematics. He did not take any exams, but he first encountered computer design there. In 1966, aged 22, he moved to Berkeley, California.

Early career and Oracle

While working at Ampex in the early 1970s, he became influenced by Edgar F. Codd's research on relational database design for

IBM

. That led in 1977 to the formation of the company which later became Oracle. Oracle became a successful database vendor to mid- and low-range systems, later competing with Sybase (created 1984) and Microsoft SQL Server (a port of Sybase created in 1989) which led to Ellison being listed by ''Forbes'' as one of the richest people in the world.

1977–1994

During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a

database

for the

CIA

, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a 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) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.

In 1979, the company renamed itself Relational Software Inc. Ellison had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to achieve compatibility with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's code. The initial release of the Oracle Database in 1979 was called Oracle version 2; there was no Oracle version 1. In 1983, the company officially became Oracle Systems Corporation after its flagship product. In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% of its workforce (about 400 people) because it was losing money. This crisis, which almost resulted in the company'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 had to settle 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

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