Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison is an American businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who is a co-founder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation. As of November 2022, he was listed by Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated fortune of $91 billion. Ellison is also known for his 98% ownership stake in Lanai, the sixth-largest island in the Hawaiian Archipelago.

Larry Ellison was born in New York City to an unwed Jewish mother. His biological father was an Italian-American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison contracted pneumonia 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.

Ellison moved to Chicago's South Shore, then a middle-class neighborhood. He remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, unlike his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, who had chosen 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.

Although Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive parents, who attended synagogue regularly, he remained a religious skeptic. At age thirteen, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration. 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 true, but I don't. I see no evidence for this stuff." Ellison says that his fondness for Israel is not connected to religious sentiments but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis in the technology sector.

Ellison attended South Shore High School in Chicago and later was admitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was enrolled as a premed student. At the university, he was named science student of the year. However, he withdrew without taking final exams after his sophomore year because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending the summer of 1966 in California, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he studied physics and mathematics and first encountered computer design. In 1966, aged 22, he moved to Berkeley, California.

While working at Ampex in the early 1970s, he was influenced by Edgar F. Codd's research on relational database design for IBM. That led 1977 to the formation of the company, which later became Oracle. Oracle became a successful database vendor to mid- and low-range systems, later competing with Sybase (created in 1984) and Microsoft SQL Server (a port of Sybase began in 1989), which led to Ellison being listed by Forbes as one of the wealthiest people in the world.