Lawrence 'Larry' Ellison

Date of Birth: 08/17/1944

Lawrence Joseph 'Larry' Ellison is an American entrepreneur, co-founder, chairman of the board, and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Oracle Corporation, former CEO of Oracle (1976-2014), largest shareholder of NetSuite (acquired by Oracle in 2016 for $9.3 billion), original investor in Salesforce.com, philanthropist.

Based on his net worth of $60.6 billion in August 2017, he ranks fifth in the United States and seventh on the list of the world's richest according to Forbes.

Birthplace. Education. Born on August 17, 1944, in New York to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unmarried Jewish woman. His father was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force of Italian descent. Florence's friends took Larry to live with his aunt and uncle in Chicago when he was nine months old. He was raised by Lily Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison, never knowing his biological mother, with whom he had not spoken for 48 years.

He grew up in Chicago, attended school there, and began his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Due to the death of his adoptive mother, he failed his exams after the second year. After spending a summer in Northern California with his friend Chuck Weiss, he returned to Chicago and studied a semester at the University of Chicago, where he first encountered computer technology. In 1964, at the age of 20, he moved to Northern California.

Business. In the early 1970s, he worked at Amdahl and Ampex. One of his projects at Ampex was the development of a DBMS for the CIA, which he named Oracle.

Edgar Codd's paper 'A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks' had a great influence on Ellison, regarded as the first work on the relational data model. Together with two Ampex colleagues, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977. In 1979, SDL was renamed Relational Software Inc. and a few years later, in 1982, it became Oracle, named after its main product - the Oracle database. Based on knowledge of IBM's System R DBMS, which also relied on Codd's ideas, Ellison tried to make Oracle compatible. However, IBM refused to disclose the source code, and compatibility could not be achieved. The first released version was Oracle v2 in 1979; for marketing reasons, no version number 1 was given.

In the 1980s, Oracle released new versions of the DBMS. In 1986, Oracle went public, and in just three years, the company multiplied its revenue from $584 million tenfold. By 1990, the company was in trouble, reported losses, and had to lay off hundreds of employees.

In September 2014, he stepped down as CEO of Oracle after nearly 38 years, but remained chairman and became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Oracle. In this position, he continues to oversee the development of software and hardware at Oracle.

In November 2016, Oracle acquired NetSuite for $9.3 billion. At the time of purchase, Ellison held a 35% stake and personally received $3.5 billion from the deal.

Legacy. Ellison's name first appeared in Forbes magazine in 1986 when his net worth was estimated at $185 million. During the dot-com boom in 2000, his net worth was estimated at $48 billion.

In September 2012, his net worth was estimated at $44 billion - third place in the U.S. (after Gates and Buffett's fortunes).

In February 2016, his net worth was estimated at $43.6 billion (seventh place in the world).

In August 2017, his net worth was estimated at $60.6 billion. in the Forbes ranking, he ranks fifth in the U.S. and seventh in the world.

In 2019, his net worth was estimated at $62.5 billion, earning him seventh place on Forbes' list of the world's richest people.

Philanthropist. In August 2010, it was reported that Ellison is one of the 40 billionaires who have joined 'The Giving Pledge' campaign (a campaign to encourage wealthy individuals to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes). Ellison stated: 'Many years ago, I placed nearly all of my wealth into a trust fund to give at least 95% of my wealth to charity. I have already donated hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research and education and will donate billions over time. Until now, I have done this quietly because I have given.