Larry Ellison

Based on Wikipedia: Larry Ellison

On September 10, 2025, for a few fleeting hours, Larry Ellison became the richest person on Earth. His net worth touched 393 billion dollars—a number so large it exceeds the entire economic output of Denmark. Then the markets shifted, and he wasn't anymore. But for a man who has spent five decades collecting yachts, islands, and database customers with equal voracity, the title was almost beside the point.

Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle Corporation, the company that quietly powers much of the world's digital infrastructure. If you've ever used an ATM, booked a flight, or had your medical records stored electronically, there's a decent chance Oracle's database software was involved somewhere in the chain. He ran Oracle as chief executive for 37 years before stepping aside in 2014, though he never really stepped away—he remains the company's chief technology officer and executive chairman, still pulling the strings at age 80.

He also owns 98 percent of Lanai, the sixth-largest Hawaiian island. We'll get to that.

The Orphan from the South Shore

Ellison's origin story reads like something a novelist would reject as too on-the-nose. Born in 1944 in New York City to a young Jewish mother named Florence Spellman, he contracted pneumonia at nine months old. His mother, unmarried and overwhelmed, gave him up. Her aunt and uncle in Chicago adopted the infant, and Ellison wouldn't see his biological mother again until he was 48 years old.

His biological father was an Italian-American pilot in the United States Army Air Corps. Ellison never knew him.

The adoptive family lived in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, then a solidly middle-class Jewish area. Ellison's adoptive mother, Lillian, was warm and loving. His adoptive father, Louis, was something else entirely—austere, emotionally distant, perpetually disappointed. Louis had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate before losing it all in the Great Depression. He had chosen his surname to honor Ellis Island, where he'd first stepped onto American soil. The name, meant to commemorate hope and new beginnings, seemed to mock him after his financial ruin.

The household was Reform Jewish, and the family attended synagogue regularly. But young Larry was having none of it. At thirteen, he refused to have a bar mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony that Jewish boys typically celebrate. "While I think I am religious in one sense," he later explained, "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."

This willingness to reject orthodoxy—religious, corporate, or otherwise—would become his defining characteristic.

The Accidental Education

Ellison enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a pre-med student. He was named science student of the year. Then his adoptive mother died, and he simply walked away. He never took his final exams, never completed his sophomore year.

After spending a summer in California—a place that would reshape his entire life—he tried again, enrolling at the University of Chicago for a single term. There he studied physics and mathematics, but more importantly, he encountered computer design for the first time. Something clicked.

He never graduated from either institution. Instead, he moved to Berkeley and started working as a computer programmer, bouncing between companies in the way that young technical workers often did in the freewheeling early days of Silicon Valley. One of those jobs was at Ampex Corporation, where his first major project was building a database for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The code name for that CIA project? Oracle.

The Paper That Changed Everything

In 1970, an IBM researcher named Edgar F. Codd published a paper with the dry academic title "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." It's the kind of title that makes normal people's eyes glaze over. But for the small community of database enthusiasts, it was revolutionary.

To understand why, you need to understand what databases looked like before Codd. They were hierarchical nightmares—imagine a massive filing cabinet where every drawer connects to specific folders, which connect to specific documents, in rigid, predetermined ways. If you wanted to find information, you had to know exactly where it was stored and navigate the exact path to get there. Changing the structure meant rebuilding everything.

Codd proposed something radically different: organizing data into simple tables (he called them "relations") that could be queried flexibly. Instead of following predetermined paths, you could ask questions in plain logic: "Give me all customers in California who bought products last month." The database would figure out how to find the answer.

This is now so fundamental to how computers work that it's invisible, like plumbing. Every website you visit, every app on your phone, every corporate system in existence relies on relational databases. But in the early 1970s, it was just a theory.

IBM, characteristically, sat on the idea. They built a research prototype called System R but showed no urgency to commercialize it. They were making too much money selling mainframe computers to care about some academic's paper.

Larry Ellison cared.

Building Oracle

In 1977, Ellison and two colleagues from Ampex—Bob Miner and Ed Oates—founded a company called Software Development Laboratories. The total initial investment was 2,000 dollars, of which Ellison put up 1,200. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly 10,000 dollars in today's money. Not nothing, but not exactly venture capital either.

Ellison wanted to build a commercial relational database based on Codd's theories. He also wanted it to be compatible with IBM's System R prototype, which would make it easier for IBM customers to adopt. But IBM, still not taking the market seriously, refused to share System R's error codes—the technical specifications that would allow other systems to work seamlessly with it.

So Ellison built his own thing.

The company renamed itself Relational Software, Inc. in 1979, the same year they released their database product. They called it Oracle, borrowing from that CIA project. And in a move that perfectly captured Ellison's bravado, they numbered this initial release "Oracle version 2."

There was no version 1. Ellison figured customers would be nervous about buying the first version of anything, so he simply skipped it.

Growing Pains and Near-Death

The 1980s were boom years for Oracle. The company rode the wave of corporate computing, selling database licenses to businesses that were just beginning to digitize their operations. By 1990, the company officially renamed itself Oracle Systems Corporation.

Then it nearly collapsed.

The problem was a particularly aggressive sales culture that Ellison had cultivated. Oracle salespeople were compensated based on the deals they closed, and they discovered a neat trick: convince customers to buy enormous amounts of software upfront, book the entire value of those future license renewals in the current quarter, and collect massive bonuses. The sales looked fantastic. The reality was a house of cards.

When customers didn't actually need all that software—when the future sales failed to materialize—Oracle had to restate its earnings. Twice. The company laid off 10 percent of its workforce, about 400 people. Class-action lawsuits followed. For a while, bankruptcy seemed possible.

Ellison later called it "an incredible business mistake." He survived it, barely, and learned to channel his aggression more carefully.

The Database Wars

The 1990s became a decade of corporate combat. Oracle's competitors included Sybase, Informix, IBM's DB2, and eventually Microsoft's SQL Server. Ellison waged war against all of them with a ferocity that made front-page news in Silicon Valley.

His rivalry with Phil White, the CEO of Informix, became legendary. For three years, the two companies traded barbs, stole customers, and attacked each other in press releases. In April 1997, Informix announced a massive revenue shortfall and had to restate its earnings. Phil White eventually went to jail. Oracle had won.

Sybase had already wounded itself mortally. In 1993, they sold the rights to their Windows database software to Microsoft, which rebranded it as SQL Server. Then Sybase merged with Powersoft in 1996 and lost focus on its core technology. Another competitor neutralized.

By the late 1990s, Oracle's main competition came from Microsoft and IBM—companies large enough to absorb punishment and keep fighting. The database market had consolidated into an oligopoly, and Ellison sat at its center.

The Steve Jobs Connection

In 1997, Apple Computer was in trouble. The company had fired Steve Jobs over a decade earlier and had been wandering in the wilderness ever since, releasing forgettable products while Microsoft ate its lunch. Then Jobs returned, and everything changed.

Ellison became an Apple board member that same year. The two tech titans had been close friends since the 1990s—both were mercurial visionaries with enormous egos and an appetite for excellence. At one point, Ellison publicly floated the idea of buying Apple outright, though that plan never materialized.

He served on Apple's board until 2002, helping oversee the company's resurrection. The iPod had just launched. The iPhone was still five years away. But the trajectory was clear: Jobs was building something extraordinary, and Ellison had a front-row seat.

Buying the Sun

In April 2009, Oracle announced it would acquire Sun Microsystems, the company that created the Java programming language and sold high-end computer hardware to businesses. IBM and Hewlett-Packard had also been circling Sun, and the acquisition became a three-way tug-of-war. Oracle won.

The deal closed in January 2010 and brought Oracle something potentially dangerous: MySQL. Sun had acquired MySQL in 2008, and now Oracle controlled the world's most popular open-source database—the same technology that powered countless startups and websites that couldn't afford Oracle's expensive licenses.

Critics worried that Oracle would kill MySQL to eliminate competition. Instead, Ellison kept it alive, though with less enthusiasm than MySQL's open-source community would have liked. The acquisition made Oracle a hardware company as well as a software company, a transformation that required years of adjustment.

The Highest-Paid Executive of the Decade

Ellison's compensation at Oracle became legendary. In 2007, his total pay package was 61 million dollars. In 2008, it rose to 84 million. In July 2010, The Wall Street Journal calculated that Ellison had been the highest-paid executive of the entire previous decade, collecting 1.84 billion dollars in total compensation over ten years.

This wasn't primarily salary—his base pay was often just a million dollars, and in 2010 he accepted a salary of exactly one dollar. The real money came from stock options: the right to buy Oracle shares at a fixed price, then sell them at market value. As Oracle's stock climbed, those options became worth fortunes.

Critics argued that such compensation was excessive, that no single person could possibly add billions of dollars in value to a company. Ellison didn't seem particularly bothered by the criticism.

The Island

In June 2012, Ellison did something that even by billionaire standards was unusual: he bought an island. Not a small island. Lanai, the sixth-largest of the Hawaiian Islands, spanning roughly 141 square miles of volcanic rock, beaches, and former pineapple plantations.

He purchased 98 percent of it from David Murdock, the chairman of Dole Food Company, for somewhere between 500 and 600 million dollars. The price was never officially confirmed.

Lanai had once been the world's largest pineapple plantation, producing 75 percent of the world's supply at its peak. By the time Ellison bought it, that era was long over. The island had about 3,000 residents and two luxury resorts. Ellison announced plans to transform it into a sustainable living laboratory—solar power, organic agriculture, electric vehicles, desalination plants.

Whether those plans have fully materialized remains debatable. But Ellison now owns essentially an entire Hawaiian island, which is the kind of thing that was supposed to be impossible after the age of colonial trading companies.

Stepping Back (Sort Of)

On September 18, 2014, Ellison announced that he would no longer serve as Oracle's CEO. Mark Hurd, his close friend and former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, would become co-CEO alongside Safra Catz. Ellison would take the titles of executive chairman and chief technology officer.

The story behind Hurd's arrival at Oracle is quintessentially Ellison. In August 2010, HP's board had fired Hurd over an expense account scandal involving a contractor. Ellison was furious. He wrote a public letter calling HP's board "idiots" and comparing their decision to Apple's board firing Steve Jobs years earlier. Within weeks, Oracle hired Hurd as co-president.

This wasn't just friendship—it was a pointed rebuke to corporate governance norms. Ellison believed Hurd was a brilliant operator, and he didn't care what HP's board or anyone else thought about the propriety of hiring him.

Mark Hurd served as Oracle's co-CEO until his death in 2019.

The Political Turn

Ellison's political activities have shifted rightward over time. In 2012, he donated to both Democratic and Republican politicians, maintaining the transactional bipartisanship common among tech billionaires. But by 2016, something had changed.

He became one of the largest donors to Conservative Solutions PAC, a super political action committee supporting Marco Rubio's presidential campaign, contributing 4 million dollars. He called Rubio a centrist, though Rubio's voting record suggested otherwise. In 2020, he allowed Donald Trump to hold a fundraiser at his estate in Rancho Mirage, California, though Ellison himself didn't attend.

Most controversially, The Washington Post reported in May 2022 that Ellison participated in a phone call just days after the 2020 presidential election. The call focused on strategies for challenging the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory. Other participants allegedly included Sean Hannity, Senator Lindsey Graham, and attorneys connected to Trump's legal efforts to overturn the results.

Ellison's spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of that call.

In January 2025, Ellison appeared at the White House alongside Sam Altman of OpenAI and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank to announce the Stargate Project, an artificial intelligence infrastructure initiative. Whatever his role in 2020's election challenges, he clearly maintained access to the highest levels of power.

Israel and Controversy

Ellison has been a major financial supporter of Israel, though he insists this connection isn't religious. "Since Israel's founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home," he said in 2017 while donating 16.6 million dollars to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. It was the largest donation in that organization's history.

In 2019, he helped fund an archaeological excavation project in East Jerusalem that drew criticism from Palestinians, Israeli peace activists, and some archaeologists who argued the dig was connected to efforts to expand Israeli settlement in disputed areas. A billion-dollar lawsuit filed that year accused Ellison and several other Israel supporters of conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories. The case was dismissed in February 2024.

His relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu has been particularly close. Ellison reportedly lobbied an Israeli businessman to drop his lawyer so that Netanyahu could hire that same lawyer for one of his corruption cases. In 2021, Ellison offered Netanyahu a seat on Oracle's board. The same year, Netanyahu and his family vacationed on Lanai as Ellison's guests.

Theranos and Other Investments

Not all of Ellison's bets have paid off. He was an early investor in Theranos, the blood-testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that claimed to revolutionize medical diagnostics. It couldn't. The technology never worked as advertised, and Holmes was eventually convicted of fraud. Ellison is portrayed by actor Hart Bochner in "The Dropout," the 2022 miniseries about the scandal.

He also co-founded a cancer technology startup called Project Ronin in partnership with physician David Agus. The company intended to transform cancer care by rapidly analyzing data from electronic medical records. It closed in 2024, having failed to achieve its ambitious goals.

But his successful investments have far outweighed the failures. He held significant stakes in Salesforce, NetSuite (which Oracle eventually acquired for 9.3 billion dollars, netting Ellison 3.5 billion on his 35 percent ownership), and Tesla, where he served on the board from 2018 to 2022. As of mid-2023, he still owned about 1.4 percent of Tesla's shares.

Six Marriages

Ellison has been married six times—a fact that speaks to some combination of romantic optimism and inability to sustain long-term partnerships.

His first marriage, to Adda Quinn in 1967, ended in divorce in 1974. His second marriage, to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins, lasted only two years; when they divorced in 1978, she sold her shares in what would become Oracle back to Ellison for 500 dollars. Those shares would eventually be worth billions.

His third wife, Barbara Boothe, was a former receptionist at Oracle. They married in 1983 and divorced in 1986. They had two children: David and Megan, who as of 2024 were both film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures respectively. The entertainment industry apparently runs in the family.

Details about his fourth, fifth, and sixth marriages are less publicly documented, which is perhaps intentional. After a certain number of divorces, even billionaires learn to keep some things private.

The Richest Man in the World (Briefly)

Wealth rankings among the ultra-rich are inherently unstable. Net worth calculations depend on stock prices, which fluctuate by the minute. On any given day, the title of "world's richest person" might shift between Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, and a handful of others.

On September 10, 2025, it shifted to Larry Ellison. His net worth touched 393 billion dollars, surpassing everyone else on the planet. The moment didn't last—by the end of the day, market movements had reshuffled the rankings again. But for those few hours, the orphan from Chicago's South Shore, the college dropout who'd stumbled into computer science, the database salesman who'd built an empire, stood alone at the summit of global capitalism.

It's worth pausing on that number: 393 billion dollars. It's more than the market capitalization of most Fortune 500 companies. It's enough to fund NASA's budget for fifteen years. It's roughly equivalent to the combined wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American households.

What does one do with such resources? Buy islands, apparently. Fund archaeological digs. Support political causes. Build software that runs the world's largest corporations. And occasionally, briefly, become the richest person alive.

Legacy

Ellison remains, at 80, actively involved in Oracle's technology direction. The company has pivoted toward cloud computing, competing with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud for the lucrative business of running other companies' software on Oracle's servers. Whether Oracle can successfully make this transition—whether any company built on 1970s database technology can reinvent itself for the age of artificial intelligence—remains an open question.

But whatever happens next, Ellison's impact on the technology industry is already cemented. He took an academic paper about data organization and built a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He survived near-bankruptcy, outlasted competitors, acquired rivals, and accumulated wealth on a scale that would have seemed absurd to his adoptive father, the man who lost everything in the Depression.

Louis Ellison chose his surname to honor Ellis Island, the gateway through which millions of immigrants entered America in search of better lives. His adopted son, who refused his religion and dropped out of his colleges and ignored his expectations, became one of the richest people in human history.

That's either a vindication of the American dream or a commentary on its absurdity. Possibly both.