Larry Ellison (birth name Lawrence Joseph Ellison) was born on August 17, 1944 in Bronx, New York, USA. He is the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, a major enterprise software company.
Biography and Career :
He was born to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unwed Jewish mother and because of her mother situation he had to be raised by his aunt and uncle, Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison, who adopted him when he was nine month old. He had to drop out of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the second year after his adoptive mother died and after he spent one summer in Northern California with his friend Chuck Weiss he attended the University of Chicago.
He began his career working at Ampex Corporatio
n and there he made a project for C.I.A. which he called it Oracle. In 1977 with 2000 dollars he founded Oracle which was called first Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979 the company was renamed Relational Software Inc and soon Oracle.
In 1990 Oracle was near bankruptcy and in the next years was always in the back of its competitors on IT market: IBM, Sybase and later Informix when they bought Sybase. The conquest between Phil White and Ellison was the front page of newspapers for almost three years. In 1997 Oracle finally beat Informix and Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs came back to the company but in 2002 he resigned. Oracle dominated the market until Microsoft became the most powerful company in this sector.
In 2005, Oracle paid Ellison a $975,000 salary, a $6,500,000 bonus, and other compensation of $955,100 and now Ellison is one of the richest Americans. He owns a lot of boats, cars like McLaren F1, Bentley Flying Spur, Bentley Continental GT, and several Acura NSX, which is his favorite daily driver, a private jet and also a house estimated to cost over 200 millions dollars.
Trivia :
- He has been married four times and he has two children.
- His fortune was estimated by Forbes being about $13.7 billion in 2005 and in 2007 it get doubled and he is one of the 10 wealthiest persons in US.
- His occupation is Chief executive officer
Quotes :
- "If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden." Image Source : flickr.com