Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison
Born	(1944-08-17) August 17, 1944 Manhattan, New York, United States
Occupation	Chief executive officer
Website	oracle.com../ellison

Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, a major database software company.

Early life

Ellison was born in New York City to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unwed mother who asked that her aunt and uncle in Chicago, Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopt him when he was nine months old. Larry did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48; the identity of his father is unknown. The Ellison home was a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, populated mostly with lower middle class Jews. Ellison remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, a Russian Jew from the Crimea who adopted the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the USA, Ellis Island. Louis was a modest government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression. Larry was a bright but inattentive student. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, after not taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died. After a summer in Northern California where he hung out with his friend Chuck Weiss, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer programming. At 20 years of age, he moved to northern California for good.

Personal life

Larry Ellison has been married four times.[1] His first three marriages ended in divorce. He was married to Adda Quinn, between 1967 and 1974. He was married to Mary Wheeler between 1977 and 1978. From 1983 to 1986, he was married to Barbara Boothe, with whom he had two children. Since December 18, 2003, he has been married to romance novelist and Oberlin grad Melanie Craft.

On 18 December 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. His friend, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, was the official photographer. Craft is Ellison's fourth spouse. He has a son and a daughter by a previous spouse.

Career

Larry Ellison is currently the richest man in the world. Ellison is worth $53 billion dollars while Bill Gates is $51.75 billion dollars.

On Ellison and his career, see The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation [2] and Symonds (2003).

During the 1970s, Ellison worked for the Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle," the abstract idea which was dismissed by a University of Chicago professor.

Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up a mere $2000 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM made this impossible by keeping secret System R's error codes. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2 – there was no Oracle 1. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.

In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of a mismatch between cash and revenues. This crisis, which almost resulted in Oracle's bankruptcy, came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also to settle out of court class action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison would later say that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."

Although IBM dominated the mainframe relational database market with its DB2 and SQL/DS database products, it delayed entering the market for a relational database on UNIX and Windows operating systems. This left the door open for Sybase, Oracle, and Informix (and eventually Microsoft) to dominate mid-range and microcomputers.

Around this time, Oracle fell behind technically to Sybase. In 1990-1993, Sybase was the fastest growing database company and the database industry's darling vendor, but soon fell victim to its merger mania. Sybase's 1993 merger with PowerSoft resulted in a loss of focus on its core database technology. In 1993, Sybase sold the rights to its database software running under the Windows operating system to Microsoft Corporation, which now markets it under the name "SQL Server."

In 1994, Informix Software overtook Sybase and became Oracle's most important rival. The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison was front page Silicon Valley news for three years. Ultimately, Oracle defeated Informix in 1997. In the same year, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002, saying that he did not have the time to attend necessary formal board meetings. In November of 2005, a book detailing the war between Oracle and Informix was published. "The Real Story of Informix Software and Phil White" provides a detailed chronology of the battle of Informix against Oracle, and how Informix Software's CEO Phil White landed in jail because of his obsession to overtake Ellison.

Once Informix and Sybase were defeated, Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft's SQL Server in the late 90s and IBM's acquisition of Informix Software in 2001 to complement their DB2 database. Today Oracle's main competition for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems is with IBM's DB2 and with Microsoft SQL Server (which only runs on Windows). IBM's DB2 still dominates the mainframe database market.

In 2005, Oracle paid Ellison a $975,000 salary, a $6,500,000 bonus, and other compensation of $955,100. [3]

Forbes listed Ellison's 2005 net worth as $18.4 billion, making him one of the richest people in America, and the ninth richest man in the world. For a short period in 2000, Ellison was the richest man in the world.[4] In 2006, Forbes ranked Ellison as the richest Californian.[5] In interviews, Ellison notes that his actual wealth -- money that he is realistically free to spend -- is more like $2 billion, and that if he tried to sell all of his Oracle stock, its price would fall to zero.

Ellison also owns large stakes in both Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Lifestyle

Boats

Ellison's company is the second largest financier of Oracle BMW Racing, which competed for the America's Cup in 2003 on behalf of the Golden Gate Yacht Club of San Francisco. Now named BMW Oracle Racing due to increased financial support from BMW, it was the Challenger of Record for the 2007 America's Cup in Valencia, Spain until it was eliminated from the Louis Vuitton Cup[6].

Ellison won the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race in his yacht "Sayonara". A storm that broke out during the race cost 6 sailors (none from the Sayonara) their lives, an experience that led Ellison to swear off personal participation in ocean racing.

Ellison owns the fourth largest yacht in the world named "Rising Sun" which reportedly cost over US$200 million to build. Rising Sun is 452.75ft (138 m) long.

Cars

Ellison owns many exotic cars, including a Mclaren F1, Bentley Flying Spur, Bentley Continental GT, and several Acura NSX, which is his favorite daily driver.

Private jet

Ellison is a licensed pilot and has owned several unusual aircraft. Ellison has been cited several times by city of San Jose for violating its limits on late night takeoffs and landings from San Jose Mineta International Airport by planes weighing more than 75,000 pounds (34 tonnes). In 2001, San Jose granted him a personal waiver from these regulations.

Home

Ellison styled his $20 million Woodside, California estate after feudal Japanese architecture, complete with a man-made lake and the most extensive seismic retrofit available with current technology (37°24′44.34″N 122°14′51.40″W). In 2004 and 2005, Ellison purchased more than 12 properties in Malibu, CA worth more than $180 million. The $65 million Ellison spent on five contiguous lots on Malibu's Carbon Beach was the most costly residential transaction in United States history until Ron Perelman sold his Palm Beach, Florida, compound for $70 million later that same year, according to industry writer Jeffrey Bellamar.

Sports

Ellison has been rebuffed in his attempts to buy the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers. He is now pursuing ownership of a potential future football franchise in Los Angeles.

Charitable Donations

• In order to settle an insider trading lawsuit arising from Ellison's dumping nearly $1 billion of Oracle stock, he was allowed to donate $100 million to his own charitable foundation without admitting wrongdoing. A California judge refused to allow Oracle to pay Ellison's legal fees, amounting to $24 million. Ellison's lawyer had argued that were Ellison to pay those fees, that could be construed as an admission of guilt.

• In response to the September 11th terrorist attacks, Ellison offered to donate to the Federal government software that would enable it to build and run a national identification database and issue ID cards. This offer sparked fierce debate in the media.[7]

• In 2002, the leadership of the Ellison Medical Foundation stated that it believed Ellison would increase its annual budget from $35 million to $100 million. (See sfgate.com)

• The 2004 Forbes list of the charitable donations made by the wealthiest 400 Americans stated that Ellison had donated $151,092,103 in the preceding year, about 1% of his estimated personal wealth.

• In June of 2006, Ellison announced that he would not honor his earlier pledge of $115 million to Harvard University, because of the departure of former President Lawrence Summers [8], saying "The reason I didn't finish my gift to Harvard was because of the way Larry Summers suddenly left Harvard. I lost confidence that that money would be well spent." [9]

References

• Leibovich, Mark. (October 30, 2000). "The Outsider, His Business and His Billions". Washington Post, p.A01.
• Symonds, Matthew, 2003. Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle. Simon & Schuster. With commentary by Ellison.

Quotes

• "It's my job for Oracle—the number two software company in the world—to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace, and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one."
• "I do not give fashionable answers to questions"
• "Microsoft's new revenue model might be ads. - I think that is ridiculous. It is hard to believe that Microsoft has Google envy. We're in the software business--we don't do ads. We're not going to sell ads on top of our database"
• "I'd like to win the America's Cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No. 1 software company in the world. I still think it's possible to beat Microsoft, believe it or not, for us to be a more important company than Microsoft"
• "I love sailing. I like it more when I'm winning"

There is a widely circulated article that gives the text of a speech that Ellison supposedly gave to the Yale University graduating class of 2000, but that article is actually fiction, published by the SatireWire website[10][11]; Ellison did not speak at Yale, and the speech was made up by the author of the article. The speech refers to graduates as losers, because "I, Lawrence "Larry" Ellison, second richest man on the planet, am a college dropout, and you are not. Because Bill Gates, richest man on the planet - for now anyway - is a college dropout, and you are not. Because Paul Allen, the third richest man on the planet, dropped out of college, and you did not".

External links

• Oracle Official Site
• Larry Ellison Oracle executive biography
• Forbes - World's Richest People 2006
• Forbes 400 listing
• FAQ about Oracle Corporation. This site contains some interesting factoids about Larry Ellison.
• The Ellison Medical Foundation.
• Zinko, C., et al. (2004). Larry Ellison's most important merger: Oracle CEO ties knot with novelist at Woodside estate; Steve Jobs takes wedding photos. Retrieved January 16, 2004.