Larry Ellison

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Larry Ellison (2013)

Lawrence "Larry" Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944 in the Bronx , New York City ) is the founder of the US software company Oracle and was CEO of the company from its inception until September 2014 . He currently holds the position of Executive Chairman and CTO at Oracle . Also, Ellison has been a top spot on Forbes' list of the richest billionaires for years . Ellison's company originally specialized in database software and is now also heavily serving the business solution market segment.

In June 2010, he joined billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's The Giving Pledge philanthropic campaign and confirmed that 95% of his wealth would be donated to charity.

origin

His unmarried Jewish mother, Florence Ellison, gave birth to him at the age of 19. Because of these circumstances, she gave it to relatives in Chicago after nine months . There he grew up with his aunt Lilian, the second wife of his stepfather Louis Ellison, a Russian who emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century .

He left high school in 1962 and began studying mathematics at the University of Illinois at Champaign that same year .

When his stepmother died in 1966, he failed all final exams and therefore left college without a degree.

Career

In 1967 he married his first wife, Adda Quinn, who was studying to become a teacher. In the following years he worked in various jobs at computer companies. Since the nature of these activities, mainly changing backup tapes, did not particularly challenge him, he read a few books for detailed specialist knowledge on IT topics.

In 1974 he met his future co- founders Bob Miner and Ed Oates while working for the company Ampex (multimedia) . There the three dealt, among other things, with the programming problem of the very limited mass storage devices at the time . This problem remained unsolved during her work there; Ellison and Oates left the company. That same year, Ellison developed a high-performance memory management system for Precision Instrument Company . In 1974 he divorced his first wife.

In the years that followed, Ellison continued to develop his database program, but it was too memory-intensive for the computers of the time. In a conversation with his neighbor, he recognized the potential of the software and advised him to further develop it.

After getting married for the second time in 1976, Ellison founded the company Software Development Laboratories , now known as Oracle , in 1977 with Oates and Miner in Silicon Valley with registered capital of 2000 US dollars . Starting difficulties did not prevent the founders from buying a VAX , the leading technical and scientific computer system at the time, in order to implement the database system under development on it.

The following year, 1979, the database system was expanded to work on several different computer architectures. The company was renamed Relational Software Inc. before it was renamed again: today's Oracle was chosen as a reference to the main product, the Oracle database .

Ellison's personal success goes hand in hand with that of his company, the low point being the layoff of 10% of all employees (about 4,000) in 1990, the financial high point of Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest people .

capital

The yacht Rising Sun in Stockholm on August 16, 2005

In US dollars , according to Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest people :

  • 1999: 13.0 billion, 12th place
  • 2000: 58.0 billion, 2nd place
  • 2001: 21.9 billion, 4th place
  • 2002: 15.2 billion, 5th place
  • 2003: 16.6 billion, 6th place
  • 2004: 18.7 billion, 12th place
  • 2005: 18.4 billion, 9th place
  • 2006: 19.5 billion, 4th place
  • 2007: 21.5 billion, 11th place
  • 2008: 25.0 billion, 14th place
  • 2009: 22.5 billion, 4th place
  • 2010: 28.0 billion, 6th place
  • 2011: 39.5 billion, 5th place
  • 2012: 36.0 billion, 6th place
  • 2015: 54.3 billion, 5th place
  • 2016: 43.6 billion, 7th place
  • 2017: 52.2 billion, 7th place
  • 2018: 58.5 billion, 10th place
  • 2019: 62.5 billion, 7th place

Private life

Ellison was married four times. All marriages ended in divorce. The wives were:

  • Adda Quinn (1967-1974).
  • Nancy Wheeler Jenkins (1977-1988). Ellison divorced her after 18 months of marriage.
  • Barbara Boothe (1983-1986). The marriage gave birth to the children David Ellison and Megan Ellison , both of whom work as film producers.
  • Melanie Craft (2003-2010), writer

Among other things, Ellison was co-owner of one of the largest yachts in the world, the Rising Sun , valued at around $ 200 million. With his sailing team BMW Oracle Racing , Ellison successfully took part in the America's Cup , recovered the trophy in 2010 and defended it in 2013.

About Oracle's business relationship with the NSA

In the course of an interview with CBS News, which was originally supposed to deal with Ellison / Oracle's view of a lawsuit with Google , he commented on whether he was critical of the NSA's Oracle products in the measures and programs uncovered in the 2013 surveillance scandal the US government use:

"It is great. It is great. It is very important. By the way, President Obama also thinks it's important. It's important if you want attacks like the one in Boston to be minimized. It is absolutely necessary. "

He expressed confidence in the democratically elected government and said, "If we don't like what the NSA is doing, we can just get rid of the government and put in a new one."

A red line would be crossed if the government used the data “to track down political opinions. When the Democrats used it to crack down on the Republicans. When the Republicans used it to crack down on Democrats. In other words, if we stopped looking for terrorists and started tracking down people across the aisle. "

The interview closed with his question

"Who has ever heard of the US government misusing the information?"

and the note that credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard have been doing similar things for years.

literature

  • Mike Wilson: The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison . ISBN 0-06-000876-8
  • Matthew Symonds, Larry Ellison: Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle . ISBN 0-7432-2505-8
  • Daniel Ehrenhaft: Larry Ellison: Sheer Nerve (Techies) . ISBN 0-7613-1962-X
  • David A. Kaplan: Silicon Valley. The digital dream factory and its heroes. ISBN 3-453-17989-7 (here Chap. V Oz , pp. 158–202, about Larry Ellison)
  • Julian Guthrie : The billionaire and the mechanic: how Oracle boss Larry Ellison won the America's Cup and why he needed the auto mechanic Norbert Bajurin . Translation from the English Tatjana Pokorny, Dieter Loibner. Bielefeld: Delius Klasing, 2014 ISBN 978-3-7688-3779-8

Web links

Commons : Larry Ellison  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
Wikiquote: Larry Ellison  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roland Lindner: A bang at Oracle. Larry Ellison resigns. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . September 18, 2014, accessed September 19, 2014 .
  2. ↑ forbes.com
  3. ↑ Larry Ellison's promise to donate. In: givingpledge.org. Larry Ellison, 2010, archived from the original on April 23, 2012 ; accessed on January 20, 2017 .
  4. ^ Matthew Symonds: Software: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle . Simon & Schuster, 2003, ISBN 0-7432-2504-X , pp. 57, 64, 310, 337, 348-50, 64, 349-53, 65, 84, 341-42, 347, 352-54 (accessed on August 14, 2010).
  5. ↑ IMDB bio
  6. ↑ Alexandra Knape: The largest mega yachts . manager-magazin.de, September 10, 2007; Retrieved May 1, 2008
  7. ↑ Google CEO did "evil" things, Apple is going down . CBS ; Retrieved August 15, 2013.
  8. ↑ What the NSA does is "great" . golem.de; Retrieved August 15, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Ellison, Larry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ellison, Lawrence Joseph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur, founder of the software company Oracle
DATE OF BIRTH August 17, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Bronx , New York City