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Larry Ellison Biography
Larry Ellison [full name] Lawrence Joseph Ellison, is an American entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist who is a co-founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation. Larry was listed by Forbes magazine as the fifth-wealthiest person in the United States and as the eighth-wealthiest in the world, with a fortune of $54.5 billion as of June 2018, .
Larry Ellison Education
Larry studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the University of Chicago without graduating before moving to California in 1966. He left University of Illinois after his second year, not taking his final exams, because his adoptive mother had just died. It was at the University of Chicago where he first encountered computer design after being in attendance for one term.
While working at Ampex in the early 1970s, he became influenced by Edgar F. Codd’s research on relational database design, which led to the formation of what became Oracle in 1977. It became a successful database vendor to mid- and low-range systems, competing with Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server. This influenced his inclusion on the list of the richest men in the world.
He has since signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett‘s The Giving Pledge and given up to 1% of his wealth to charity. He has also had success in yachting, through Oracle Team USA aside from his work at Oracle. Ellison is also a licensed aircraft pilot who owns two military jets.
Larry Ellison Age | Birthday
Ellison was born on 17 August 1944 in New York City, New York, United States. He is 75 years old as of 2019.
Larry Ellison’s Photo
Larry EllisonLarry Ellison Family | Larry Ellison Parents
The Oracle co-founder was born to a Jewish mother, Florence Spellman, who was unwed and an Italian American father who worked as a United States Army Air Corps pilot. As a baby, Ellison contracted pneumonia at nine months of age leading to his mother’s decision to give him up for adoption to her aunt and uncle in Chicago, Lillian Spellman Ellison and Luis Ellison. He met his biological mother again when he was 48.
He says his adoptive mother was warm and loving as compared to his harsh, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, Louis Ellison. He adopted the name Ellison honor his point of entry into the United States, Ellis Island. was a government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression.
Larry Ellison Marriage | Larry Ellison Wife| Larry Ellison Divorce
The Oracle CTO has been married four times all of which have ended in divorce. His first marriage was to Adda Quinn in 1967. At the time, Ellison was starting out and their jobs weren’t making them much money. This meant financial problems that were further enhanced by Ellison’s passion for sailing and riding. He borrowed money to buy a 34-ft. boat one day, before paying off his other smaller vessel that he had purchased earlier.
They had growing debts and Adda Quinn got worn out by her husband’s aimlessness and decided to divorce him in 1974. They went through a marriage counselling session and that is when he revealed his desire to become a millionaire but that could not change Quinn’s mind.
In 1977, he got married to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins. This was six months before Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories. She gave up any claim on her husband’s company for $500 when they got divorced in 1978.
He again got married in 1983, this time to Barbara Boothe, a former receptionist at Relational Software Inc. (RSI). They got divorced in 1986 and have two children David and Megan, who are film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively.
In 2003, Ellison got married to Melanie Craft, a romance novelist from America. Their wedding was at Ellison’s Woodside estate on December 18, 2003. The late Steve Jobs, former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Inc and Ellison’s friend was the official wedding photographer, while Representative Tom Lantos officiated the ceremony. They however got divorced in 2010.
Larry Ellison Children
Ellison is a father of two: a son and daughter. His son David Ellison was born in 1983 and he is a film producer at Skydance Media, a company he founded and for which he is the CEO. His daughter Margaret Elizabeth “Megan” Ellison, born in 1986, is also a film producer like her older brother. She is the founder of Annapurna Pictures that was established in 2011.
Larry Ellison Oracle
Ellison got hired at a small company called Ampex where he met his future partners at Oracle. As colleagues, Ellison, Edward Oates and Robert Miner they got a chance to work on a database program for CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and upon completion they called it Oracle. Theirs was a program that made retrieving and managing data very easy in addition to what other database programs were good at, that is, storing a lot of information. It was a huge leap forward at the time. Larry however left Ampex later but the former colleagues remained friends and always kept in touch.
He became the vice president of Precision Instruments Co., also a small firm. When it needed a company to create software programs for them, Ellison got the brilliant idea of starting his own business to answer Precision Instruments’ need. He spoke to Oates and Miner and convinced them to join forces and start a company. Hence in 1977, they came up with Software Development Laboratories and created different programs for Precision Instruments.
Ellison took 60% of the company’s earnings since the company idea was his while his partners took 20% each. They later named the company Oracle, after their CIA program. Later, IBM released a relational database program, that was mind blowing at the time. Ellison read the paper on relational database systems and understood they too could create similar programs and sell them to not only to Precision Instruments, but anyone.
The three managed to figure out how to create their own similar software, using the IBM paper and called it Oracle. CIA was again their customer, the first one outside Precision Instruments. A problem arose as their customers used different brands of computers, hence different versions of Oracle were needed, one for each computer type. They again realized that they could create one version that could work on any computer for their success. They sure did and their sales plummeted, but once Oracle was a multi-million company, Ellison did not know how to manage such a huge business.
In 1990, the company had huge debts that led to its stock value to fall and angry investors to sue Oracle. The board even suggested that Ellison leave but he had his mind set on overcoming the challenges. He sought help from professionals and with his great efforts, he managed to get the company back on its feet to what it is today.
Larry Ellison Mark Hurd Death
Larry Oracle Founder and Chairman confirmed Mark Hurd’s death on Friday October 18 2019. “Mark was my close and irreplaceable friend, and trusted colleague,” Larry said in a memo to Oracle employees that was posted on Mark Hurd’s personal website. “Oracle has lost a brilliant and beloved leader who personally touched the lives of so many of us during his decade at Oracle. All of us will miss Mark’s keen mind and rare ability to analyze, simplify and solve problems quickly.”
A month ago before his death Hurd took a leave of absence from Oracle for an unspecified medical reason. Since 2010 he had been a chief executive and board director at the tech company. He serves alongside Safra Catz, who is also CEO. Larry took over Hurd’s responsibilities when he left.
He was raised a Jewish home though he remains a religious skeptic. He states: “While I think I am religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not dogmas I subscribe to.
Larry Ellison Height
Ellison is 1.91 m tall.
Larry Ellison Net Worth
Larry has a net worth of 58.6 billion USD as of 2018.
Larry Ellison House | Larry Ellison Home
Ellison owns more homes than he could possibly live in. He is often referred to as “the nation’s most avid trophy-home buyer”. Some of his homes are:
- In 2012, he purchased the Hawaiian island of Lanai which is his largest overall investment by far. He owns 98% of it.
- He paid $3.9 million for a William Wurster home in San Francisco’s swanky Pacific Heights in 1988.
- In Kyoto, Japan, he has a historic garden villa that was reportedly listed for $86 million, though the price he actually paid is unknown.
- In Malibu, California, he owns at least 10 on billionaire-packed Carbon Beach, a $18 million house that belonged to producer Jerry Bruckheimer and bought in 2013 and a $48 million five-bedroom home that once belonged to the late real estate developer Norman Ackenberg. Some of his Malibu homes are often for rent, liike his 2,800-square-foot oceanfront cottage.
- He also bought a parcel for $17.6 million that is now home to Nobu Malibu, an ultra-trendy Japanese restaurant popular among Hollywood A-listers.
- A high-end Japanese concept hotel formerly the historic Casa Malibu Inn that he bought in 2007 for $20 million.
- The Malibu Racquet Club that he bought in 2007 for $6.9 million.
- In Snug Harbor, Lake Tahoe, he had a 2.5-acre home that he sold for $20.35 million in July 2014 and has two others in the area, reportedly. It is also reported that he has plans to build another home that’s three times the size of the 2.5-acre one, with 18,000 square feet of living space in addition to an island, waterfalls, and a tennis court.
- The Beechwood Villa in Newport, Rhode Island that he bought in 2010 for $10.5 million.
- Porcupine Creek, a private golf club, located in Rancho Mirage, California. It includes a main house with a whopping 16 bedrooms, in addition to several separate guest houses. He bought this in 2011 for $42.9 million.
- 21 residential properties near his Four Seasons Resorts Lanai at Manele Bay. He bought them in February 2014 and spent a little more than $41 million.
Larry Ellison Yacht
Ellison is a man who loves yachting hence, he owns some. This love has seen him participate in America’s Cup for several times and in 2010 he brought the Cup back to America for the first time in 15 years. His yacht USA 17 won the second race of the 33rd America’s Cup on February 14, 2010, after winning the first race two days earlier.
His Oracle team established kite yachting into the American Cup environment in 2002. In New Zealand, the kite traction flying continued for about 30 minutes.
He owned the eighth largest yacht in the world, Rising Sun, but in 2010, Ellison ended his ownership of the yacht. His remaining shares in the yacht, he sold to music and film mogul David Geffen. The yacht reportedly cost over $200 million to build. He “downsized” to Musashi, a 288-foot (88-metre) yacht built by Feadship.
In 2013, on September 25, the Oracle Team USA defeated Emirates Team New Zealand to win the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco Bay, California. In 2017, Oracle Racing lost the America’s Cup to Team New Zealand.
Larry Ellison Cars
As a rich man, Ellison owns a number of exotic cars. They include an Audi R8 and a McLaren F1 with his favorite being the Acura NSX. He was known to give this supercars as gifts each year during its production. He reportedly also owns a Lexus LFA and a Lexus LS(XF40).
Larry Ellison Iron Man
In 2010, Ellison made a brief cameo appearance in the film, Iron Man 2.
Larry Ellison Quotes
- When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.
- I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.
- See things in the present, even if they are in the future.
- When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re nuts.
- Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success but by the fear of failure.
Larry Ellison Donations | Larry Ellison Philanthropy
In 1992, he made a $5 million donation to seed the Lawrence J. Ellison Musculo-Skeletal Research Center after being impressed by the care of Dr. Michael W. Chapman, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of California, Davis. He also opened the Lawrence J. Ellison Ambulatory Care Center on the Sacramento campus of the UC Davis Medical Center in 1998.
He was made to donate $100 million to his own charitable foundation without admitting wrongdoing, in order to settle an insider trading lawsuit arising from him selling nearly $1 billion of Oracle stock. He made donations to Stanford University which raised questions about the independence of two Stanford professors who evaluated the case’s merits for Oracle.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, Ellison made a software donation to the federal government that would enable it to build and run a national identification database and issue ID cards but the donation turned out to be controversial. He has also donated about 1% ($151,092,103) of his estimated personal wealth. This is according to Forbes’s 2004 list of charitable donations made by the wealthiest 400 Americans.
He pledged $500,000 in 2007 to fortify a community centre in Sderot, Israel. In 2014, he made a $10 million donation to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. Again 2017, he made another donation to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. He is also part of the group of people who have signed “The Giving Pledge”. He donated $200 million to University of Southern California for establishing a cancer research center: Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC in May 2016.
Larry Ellison Amazon cloud technology lags Oracle database
On October 25 2018 Oracle co-founder Larry threw jabs at e-commerce giant Amazon because it is trying to get at their market share in the cloud.
The two tech behemoths had been engaged in a recent war of words over the performance of Oracle’s database software and cloud tools.
Recently Amazon had announced plans to move off Oracle by 2020, which caused an outage on Prime Day in one of its biggest warehouses, according to an internal report.
“Amazon now has kind of been the No. 1 brand in infrastructure cloud computing,” Ellison said during an exclusive interview with Maria Bartiromo.
“Let me tell you an interesting fact: Amazon does not use [Amazon web services] to run their business,” he added. “Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle database. They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it’s not good enough.”
“We didn’t get our database to the cloud quickly enough,” said Ellison. “So, if you wanted a cloud database, you had to go to Amazon for a database and then you’re able to go to Microsoft for a database. It took us a while for us to build a secure cloud. It’s really hard to build a secure cloud.”
Currently Amazon has a 33 percent share of the cloud market, followed by Microsoft, which has gained ground recently, climbing from 7 percent to 13 percent.
According to Larry Oracle continues to maintain a dominating position in managing most of the world’s data.
“We think we’re there now. We have by far and away been the best database in the world. Nothing is close,” he said. “We show a series of benchmarks where we’re 10 times faster than Amazon. More importantly, we’re 10 times cheaper to run the same exact thing than Amazon on our database.”