Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison built Oracle into the dominant database company and became one of the wealthiest people in the world. Born in New York in 1944 to an unmarried nineteen-year-old mother, he was raised by his great-aunt and her husband in Chicago after contracting pneumonia as an infant, and did not meet his birth mother until he was forty-eight. He dropped out of the University of Illinois and then the University of Chicago without a degree, moved to California in 1966, and worked as a programmer. The idea that made him came from a paper. Edgar Codd, an IBM researcher, had published a model in 1970 for organising data in relations — tables linked by shared keys and queried by a declarative language — which IBM was slow to commercialise for fear of undercutting its existing products. Ellison and two colleagues founded a company in 1977 on the bet that a relational database could be built and sold to anyone. They shipped version 2 first, on the reasoning that nobody buys a version 1. Oracle's growth came as much from selling as from engineering: an aggressive, quota-driven sales culture and a willingness to promise features that did not yet exist. It nearly failed in 1990 over revenue recognition and a restatement, and recovered. It bought PeopleSoft in a hostile takeover in 2005, Sun Microsystems and Java in 2010, and Cerner in 2022. He owns most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai and won the America's Cup in 2010 and 2013. He became chief technology officer in 2014 and remains the company's largest shareholder.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, businessman
