Larry Ellison Biography and his Success Story

Larry Ellison Biography and Success Story - The Founder of Oracle

Hey guy's today in this post we will read and come to know about the biography of Larry Ellison - the founder of Oracle and his success story and I hope you will like it.

Lawrence Joseph Ellison known as Larry Ellison is an American businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who is co-founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation.

Famous college dropout, Ellison built Oracle, one of the most valuable tech brands in the world. The company specializes in database technology and enterprise application software.

In 2015, Ellison announced Oracle would expand its cloud computing business. At present, Larry Ellison serves as executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, having stepped down as CEO in September 2014.

As of January 2018, he was listed by Forbes magazine as the fifth(5) - wealthiest person in the United States and as the eighth(8) - wealthiest in the world, with a fortune of $60.5 billion.

This famous IT entrepreneur and co-founder of a renowned IT company also made a cameo appearance in the Hollywood movie ‘Iron Man 2’ in 2010.

About Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison was born on 17 August, 1944 in New York City , to an unmarried Jewish mother. His biological father was an Italian American United States Army Air Corps pilot.

He developed pneumonia when he was 9 months old, which is why his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption. He did not meet his biological mother again until he was 48.

He was brought up on the south side of New York City and did not know until 12 that he was adopted. He attended the Eugene Field Elementary School in Chicago and later went to Sullivan High School.

He remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive. His adoptive father, Louis Ellison, had a small real estate business in Chicago but lost all of that during the Great Depression. Young Ellison did not go along very well with him as he was distant and unaccommodating.

Although Ellison was raised in a religious household and often attended synagogue but he grew up to become a religious skeptic who did not believe in the conventional religious dogmas. He refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration when he was 13.

Ellison studied at the University of Illinois but dropped out of college when his adoptive mother passed away. Later he went to the University of Chicago but soon dropped out of there too.

Ellison has been married 4 times. His first marriage was with Adda Quinn (1967-74); second to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins (1977-78), then to Barbara Boothe (1983-86) and had two children: David and Megan, and fourth to Melanie Craft (2003-2010).

Career - The Foundation of Oracle

After dropping out of the university, Ellison, during 1970s, started working with the Ampex Corporation. He worked to develop databases, in particular for CIA; a program that he named ‘Oracle’.

According to Ellison , the CIA was their first customer, tasking Ellison and his team with building this new database. The project was code-named Oracle.

In 1977, he founded his own company under the name of ‘Software Development Laboratories (SDL)’. He started it with two other partners and invested about 2000 US dollars in it, initially.

In the late ‘70s and early ’80, he renamed his company as ‘Relational Software Inc.’, which went on to become ‘Oracle Systems Corporation’, named after its patent invention ‘Oracle’ database.

He wanted his creation Oracle to achieve compatibility with the newly formed IBM System Inc., which was like Oracle based on Codd’s theories, but IBM refused to share System R’s code.

In 1990, Oracle started losing money in the business and laid off about 10% of its working staff. This situation emerged due to Oracle’s marketing techniques.

In 1994, Informix overhauled Sybase and became Oracle’s most important competition in the software market. The rivalry between the heads of the two companies - Phil White (Informix) and Ellison - was hyped in the media for years.

Eventually, Informix announced its bankruptcy and Phil White ended in jail; his company was absorbed by IBM in 2001.

Around the same time, Ellison who was also working as the director of Apple Computer for about 5 years now, resigned.

After Informix and Sybase were defeated in the competition, Oracle went through a period of dominance and success until Microsoft SQL Server and IBM overtook the market.

It is said that by 2005, Ellison was making a salary of $975,000 with $6,500,00 in bonus and $955,100 compensations, which eventually became $56.8 million during the late 2000s. He was ranked as the richest Californian.

In 2010, Oracle’s takeover of Sun
Microsystems was granted by the European Union. This gave Oracle the control of the popular MySQL open source database.

In the same year, Mark Hurd (ex-CEO of HP) was hired as Co-President by Ellison.

In the late 2000s, Ellison was estimated to be of net worth of $28 billion. ‘The Wall Street Journal’ reported him to be the best-paid executive.

Awards & Achievements 

Ellison's yacht USA 17 won the second race of the 33rd America's Cup.

He and his BMW Oracle team returned to America from Spain in 2010 with the title, for the first time in more than a decade.

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