Larry Ellison is the founder and CEO of the enterprise software company Oracle Corporation. He is also a well-known American billionaire and philanthropist.
Lawrence Joseph Ellison, better known as Larry Ellison, was born in New York City on August 17, 1944 to a young unwed Jewish mother. In order to provide her son with a better upbringing, Ellison's mother gave him to Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison, her aunt and uncle in Chicago. They formally adopted Ellison when he was only nine months old. Ellison didn't meet or reunite with his birth mother until he was 48.
Ellison's adoptive father took the name Ellison when he entered the US from his native Crimea as a tribute to Ellis Island. He also hoped to conceal his Jewish heritage. In his early years, Ellison grew up in the middle-class neighbourhood of Chicago's South Shore. Although he fondly recalls the nurturing and supportive nature of his adoptive mother, his adoptive father was often distant and cold.
Although he was labelled as an intelligent child, Larry Ellison was inattentive in his studies. After graduating from South Shore High School, Ellison attended the University of Illinois but left at the end of his second year after the death of his adoptive mother. He spent the summer living in Northern California with his friend Chuck Weiss then continued his studies at the University of Chicago. He only spent one term at the University during which time he discovered computer programming and permanently relocated to Northern California. He was 20 years old at the time.
Although his short attention span worked against him during his academic career, Ellison's drive and impatience worked perfectly in line with the needs of computer programming. He worked for a variety of companies as a computer programmer and spent his free time hiking and climbing in Yosemite. In 1967 he married Adda Quinn. The marriage lasted seven years and ended in a divorce in 1974.
During the later years of his marriage, Larry Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation as a programmer on a database project for the CIA. Ellison named the project "Oracle", a name he would later use to signify his own company. While working on the project, Ellison read "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" by Edgar F. Codd which inspired him to front the initial $2000 as the start-up fee for his own database systems company named Software Development Laboratories. It switched names a few times and ended up as Oracle.
Larry Ellison wanted his Oracle database system to be compatible with the IBM System R, but IBM refused to share the code necessary to make this possible. So Ellison was forced to release his system as a singular data sharing system. The original release was called Oracle 2, despite the lack of an original Oracle or Oracle 1. During this time Ellison also married Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from whom he divorced one year later.
IBM, Ellison's initial rival, was the primary database system for companies but failed to initiate a system for smaller companies and microcomputers. Ellison, along with other entrepreneurs took advantage of the void and flooded the market with their systems. Oracle, Sybase, and eventually Microsoft took over the market.
Just before the rise of Oracle, Larry Ellison met and married his third wife, Barbara Boothe, with whom he had two children. They divorced in 1986 after three years of marriage.
As Oracle rose to power along with other database systems, its primary competitor, Sybase, was taken over by PowerSoft and lost some of its hold on the market. Although the original Sybase software was sold to Microsoft and turned into the well-known "SQL Server", this merger allowed Oracle to recover from a financial fall and lead the open market in database systems.
For a short time Larry Ellison served as director of Apple Computer when Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997. He resigned the position in 2002, sighting his inability to attend formal meetings, and one year later married his fourth wife, Melanie Craft. Steve Jobs served as the official photographer at the wedding. Lawrence Ellison has five children, two with his third wife and three with Melanie Craft.
