Lawrence Joseph “Larry” Ellison is the
executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation. He is
popularly known for co-founding Oracle and also being the CEO of Oracle. Larry
Ellison is currently the fifth richest man in the world with a net wealth of
$50billion as at June 2015 (estimated by Forbes). Ellison is an American
magnate in the computer software Industry known for being a great programmer,
internet Entrepreneur, and a successful Businessman.
Oracle is a database management system
created by Larry Ellison and his two friends, Ed Oates and Robert Bob Miner.
Ellison was born on 17th
August, 1944 in Bronx, New York, to a Jewish mother and an American father. At an early age, nine months,
Ellison developed Pneumonia and his single mother, Florence Spellman, sent him
to south Chicago to leave with her Aunt. Florence’s Aunt adopted Ellison and
raised him in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago. It was until age 12 that
Ellison got to know he was adopted but saw his biological parents at age
48. As a child, Ellison started showing
high level of intelligence in maths and science.
Ellison graduated from South
Shore High School in 1962 and was admitted to University of Illinois where he
was named the science student of the year in his first year. In his second
year, final semester his adoptive mother died which forced Ellison to drop out
of Illinois. He stayed home for a summer in northern California and enrolled at
University of Chicago for a semester and dropped out again. Ellison’s adoptive
father who saw young Ellison as rebellious now concluded that his son was
aimless upon his second drop out.
Though Ellison dropped out of college,
he made good use of the programming skill he acquired.
After dropping out of Chicago
University, he headed to Berkeley, California in 1966 with little dollars just
for food. At Berkeley, he worked with a number of companies but finally settled
at Ampex. It was at Ampex that Ellison met his Oracle partners, Edward Oates
and Robert miner who were his co-workers. Ellison left Ampex in 1976 and moved
to Precision Instruments Co (renamed as Omex) where he ended up becoming the
Vice President of research and development. In 1977, Precision Instruments
needed a software company to write its software, so Ellison formed a company
with his formal co-workers and named it Software Development Labs (SDL) to
design the software for Precision Instruments and other companies. They won a
contract to design a database program for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
which they named “Oracle.”
In 1979, they
changed the company’s name to Relational Software, Inc and released their first
commercial relational database which they also named Oracle. The decision to
design Oracle for commercial application was influenced by a journal Ellison
read called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks"
written by the British-born Computer Scientist Edgar F. Codd. IBM adopted Oracle for its mainframe systems
which helped doubled Oracles sales for some years.
In 1982, they changed the company’s
name again to Oracle Corporation and floated their first share in 1986 which
raised an amount of $31.5 million for the company.
In 1990, the company disclosed their
first loss due to previously overstated earnings. As a result of this the
company lay off about 10% of its employees and replaced most of its senior
management with experienced staff. The company‘s financial conditions strengthened
again in early 1992. Oracle’s wealth upsurge throughout the 1990s and Ellison
who was the largest shareholder became one of the richest men in the world.
Ellison started increasing oracle’s market share by acquiring some companies in
the industry. In early 2005 they acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3billion.
Personal
Life
Ellison got married to Adda Quin in
1967 whom he met at Berkeley employment agency. Adda divorced Ellison in 1974
claiming Ellison was aimless and was only living on debts. It was at this point
that Ellison decided to be a millionaire. In 1977 just some few months prior to
the formation of Software Development Labs, Ellison got married to Nancy
Wheeler. The couple divorced in 1978 and Ellison got married to Barbara Boothe,
formal receptionist at Relational Software Inc, in 1983 and also got divorced
in 1986. He had two children, David and Megan, with Boothe. Ellison’s
current
marriage was from 2003 to 2010 with Melanie Craft, a romance novelist.
Ellison used to own the eighth-largest
yacht in the world. The boat is known as “Rising Sun” and is over 450 feet long
and cost $200 million to build. He sold the Yacht to David Geffen.
Ellison is a licensed pilot who has
owned a number of aircraft. On September 18, 2014, Ellison declared that he would
be stepping down as the CEO of Oracle for Mark Hurd and Safra Catz to take over.
Lessons from Ellison’s story
Determination: His first wife divorced
him because Ellison was living on debt and also saw Ellison to be aimless. This
divorce made him more determined to be a millionaire.
Focused: Ellison focused on the
programming skill he gained at college.
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