Larry Ellison the man Behind the Oracle
Lawrence Joseph or “Larry” Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who is a co-founder and the executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO) of Oracle Corporation.As of March 2019, he was listed by Forbes magazine as the fourth-wealthiest person in the United States, and as the seventh-wealthiest in the world, with a fortune of $66.1 billion, (increased from $54.5 billion in 2018)
Childhood
Ellison was born on the New yourk to a poor, unmarried, 19-year-old mother. A sickly child, he was adopted by his uncle and aunt. The latter died before he ended his teens. Ellison bucked the norms and his family’s pressure to become a doctor to grow into one of the richest people in the world.His biological father was an Italian American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison 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.It is a middle class family.
Then move to Chicago US. His adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, who had adopted 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.synagogue regularly, he remained a religious skeptic. 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.” At age thirteen, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration. Ellison says that his love affair with Israel is not connected to religious sentiments, but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis in the technology sector.
Early life
In the 1970s, Ellison, a college dropout, spun through an eight-year series of jobs that included the Fireman’s Fund, Wells Fargo & Company and Amdahl Corporation. On the way, he picked up basic computer skills that he used as a programmer at Amdahl, where he worked on the first IBM-compatible mainframe system.
In 1977, Ellison and two Amdahl associates, Robert Miner and Ed Oates, launched Software Development Labs and were employed by the CIA to develop a relational database management system (RDBMS) in 1978. Ellison code-named the project Oracle. He actually called it Oracle version two, since he knew buyers would prefer that to a version one. The programmer also based his system on a new kind of database language that he had just read about in an IBM research paper: SQL. In time, Oracle became so famous it caused Ellison to be inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 1997.
Personal life
Ellison has been married and divorced four times:
- Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974.
- Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978. They married six months before Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories. In 1978, the couple divorced. Wheeler gave up any claim on her husband’s company for $500.
- Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986. Boothe was a former receptionist at Relational Software Inc. (RSI).They had two children, David and Megan, who are film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively.
- Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, from 2003 to 2010. They married on December 18, 2003, at his Woodside estate. Ellison’s late friend Steve Jobs, former CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., was the official wedding photographer,and Representative Tom Lantos officiated. They divorced in 2010.
Oracle
Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Ellison took inspiration from the 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database management systems (RDBMS) named “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”.He heard about the IBM System R database from an article in the IBM Research Journal provided by Oates. Ellison wanted to make Oracle’s product compatible with System R, but failed to do so as IBM kept the error codes for their DBMS a secret. SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc (RSI) in 1979, then again to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982,to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. At this stage Bob Miner served as the company’s senior programmer. On March 12, 1986, the company had its initial public offering. In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation,officially named Oracle, but sometimes referred to as Oracle Corporation, the name of the holding company.Part of Oracle Corporation’s early success arose from using the C programming language to implement its products. This eased porting to different operating systems (most of which support C).
Timeline
- Larry Ellison cofounded software firm Oracle in 1977 to tap into the growing need for customer relationship management databases.
- He gave up the Oracle CEO role in 2014 but still serves as chairman of the board and chief technology officer.
- As part of Oracle’s push into cloud computing, it acquired cloud-software firm Netsuite for $9.3 billion in 2016.
- In May 2016, Ellison pledged $200 million to the University of Southern California for a cancer treatment center.
- In March 2018, Ellison launched a wellness startup called Sensei, whose first project is hydroponic farming on the Hawaiian island Lanai.
- Ellison joined Tesla’s board in December 2018, after purchasing 3 million Tesla shares earlier that year.
