30 Unknown Facts About Larry Ellison – Co-Founder of Oracle

Lawrence Joseph Ellison, is the co-founder of Oracle Corporation and was also the CEO from its founding until September 2014. As of August 2017, he was ranked as the fifth-wealthiest person in America and as the seventh-wealthiest in the world, with a fortune of $60.6 billion, by Forbes magazine. Here are some interesting facts about the American businessman:

1. Ellison is a businessman and entrepreneur, who co-founded the ‘Oracle Corporation.’
2. He was born Lawrence Joseph Ellison on August 17, 1944, in Manhattan, New York.
3. He was born to an unwed 19 years old single mother Florence Spellman. His biological father was Italian American United States Army Air Corps pilot.
4. After he contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, she was not able to take care. He was legally adopted by his mother’s aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison.
5. As a teenager he was rebellious in nature and butted head with his adopted father at every opportunity. He was quoted as saying that his father’s discouraging opinion had wonderful effect on him and a powerful motivation.
6. He was raised Reform Jewish but remained religious skeptic. At his thirteen years of age, he refused to have ‘bar mitzvah’ celebration.Although he was religious in one sense, he was not for religious dogmas.
7. He attended South Shore High School and after his graduation 1962, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His academic career was undistinguished and dropped out after two years when his adoptive mother died of cancer.
8. He first encountered computer design at University of Chicago where he set out pursues physics and Mathematics but dropped after first semester.
9. In 1966 he moved to Berkeley, California and took up various job mostly related to computers for about eight years. He updated his knowledge in programming IBM machines.
10. In 1970s he briefly worked for ‘Amdahl Corporation, a technology company, before moving to ‘Ampex Corporation’ an electronic company. He mostly worked on a database for the CIA, which he called ‘Oracle.’
11. Ellison left Ampex to work as sales marketing for another company before landing as vice president of small firm called ‘Precision Instruments Co.
12. In 1977, he joined ‘Software Development Laboratories’ as a business partner founded by Bob Miner, Bruce Scott and Ed Oates and invested $ 1200 into the firm. At that time they were writing programs for Precision Instruments in their premises.
13. He was introduced to relational database systems of Edgar F. Codd and started working on (DBMS) ‘A Relationship Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.’
14. In 1979, the Software Development Laboratories was renamed as Relational Software Inc., and in 1982 officially became Oracle System Corporation with its flagship product, the Oracle RDBMS. Its first customers outside Precision Instruments were CIA and Navy.
15. They initially released Oracle RDBMS as version 2.0 and he became relentless marketer, demonstrating Oracle at trade shows and training corporate technical staff in its use.
16. Ellison’s aggressive strategy and up-front marketing only led Oracle go out of control. The sales team cut corners and booked the value of future license sale in current quarter for Go-For Gold incentive bonus.
17. In 1990, the investors sued the company for overstating the financial status and the stock price sank. Oracle had to restate its earning twice and settle class-action lawsuits.
18. In 1998, Ellison sailed in his ‘Sayonara’ yacht in a 725 miles ocean race in which six of his competitors died and he had difficulty controlling his boat. This near death experience shook him and he started to devote more time to the company.
19. Ellison was named an award recipient in the High Technology Category for the ‘Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.’
20. In 1997, he was made the director of Apple Computers and resigned in September 2002 citing lack of quality time for board meetings.
21. On January 21, 2010, the European Union approved Oracle’s acquisition of ‘Sun Microsystems, with which it gained control of the popular MySQL, open source database.
22. On June 22, 2012, Ellison agreed to buy 98% of the 141 square mile of the Hawaiian Island of ‘Lanai.’ The reported price was any were around$ 300 million.
23. He married Adda Quinn in 1967, whom he met in Berkeley employment agency. His aimlessness and passion for bike riding and boating incurred debtswhich resulted in break-up of marriage. They divorced in 1974.
24. He married three more times all resulting in divorce. He was married to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978, to Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986 and to Melanie Craft, from 2003 to 2010. He has two children David and Megan, out his marriage with Barbara Boothe.
25. Ellison is a licensed pilot and owns several aircraft and military jets including SIAI-Marchetti S.211 and Mikoyan Mig-29, which was prohibited from being imported to U.S.
26. In 2009, he bought the ‘Indian Wells Tennis Garden’ tennis facility near Palm Springs, California and the Indian Wells Masters tournament.
27. Ellison has styled his $ 110 million Woodside, California estate after feudal Japanese architecture with man-made lake and seismic retrofit.
28. In 1992, he donated $ 5 million as seed to the Lawrence J.Ellison Musculo-Skeletal Research Center and in May 2016, he donated $ 200 million to University of Southern California for establishing a cancer research center, J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC. He is also one of signatory to ‘The Giving Pledge.’
29. Ellison made cameo appearance in the 2010 film Iron Man 2. He is glimpsed briefly at the Stark Expo, when Stark says, ‘It’s the Oracle of Oracle.’
30. On September 18, 2014, Ellison announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Oracle and plans to become executive chairman and STO.
31. Larry Ellison Net Worth: $60.6 Billion