Born on August 17 1944, Lawrence Joseph Ellison is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. Ellison is a co-founder and the executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO) of Oracle Corporation. He was listed by Forbes magazine in of October 2019 as the fourth-wealthiest person in the United States. Similarly, the 75 year old billionaire is listed as the sixth-wealthiest in the world. His current net worth stands at $69.1 billion, increased from $54.5 billion in 2018.
Larry Ellison was born in New York City, to an unmarried 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, he was given to relatives for adoption. After, he was 48 years old when he met he met his biological mother again.
Firstly, Ellison studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. However, he withdrew after his second year, without taking final exams, due to the death of his adoptive mother. Then, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer design.
The Birth of Oracle
After briefly working at Amdahl Corporation in the early 1970s, Ellison switched for Ampex Corporation. There, he was influenced by Edgar F. Codd‘s research on relational database design. This led to the birth of what would become oracle in 1977.
With two partners, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977. He contributed $1,200 out of the $2,000 start up capital. In 1979, the company renamed itself Relational Software Inc., and in 1982, officially became Oracle Systems Corporation after its flagship product, the Oracle Database which he created for the CIA. Oracle became a successful database vendor to mid- and low-range systems, making Ellison among Forbes Richest Men in the World.
Larry Ellison received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Program award in the High Technology Category just in his first few years at Oracle. Also, he was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997.
Accolades
In March 2010, the Forbes list of billionaires ranked Ellison as the sixth-richest person in the world and as the third-richest American, with an estimated net worth of US$28 billion. Secondly, Ellison was reported to be the best-paid executive in the last decade from 2010. Furthermore, Ellison was listed on the Forbes list of billionaires as the fifth richest man in the world. Nonetheless, he was still the third richest American, with a net worth of about $36.5 billion. Ellison was again listed on the 2012 Forbes list of billionaires as the third richest American citizen. He was behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, with a net worth of $44 billion.
Here are the top three most powerful quotes from the extra-ordinary entrepreneur.
- Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.”
- If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you’re going to lose. The only way to really be ahead is to ‘be different’.
- All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
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