Larry Ellison

Ellison was adopted at nine months, after a bout of pneumonia nearly killed him, by his birth mother's cousin Lillian Spellman Ellison and her husband Louis, and grew up in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood believing for years that Lillian was his birth mother. Louis was distant and predicted that his son would amount to nothing. Ellison enrolled pre-med at the University of Illinois, withdrew after his adoptive mother died during his sophomore year, drifted through one term of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago, and left there too without a degree. He did not meet his biological mother, Florence Spellman, until he was 48. What formal schooling gave him was almost nothing. What replaced it was an unusual tolerance for other people's certainty that he would fail.

His first assignment at Ampex in the 1970s was building a database for the CIA under the code name Oracle. When his supervisor there, Bob Miner, started a software company in 1977, Ellison joined within months, put in 1,200 of the founding 2,000 dollars, and kept the name. Oracle Systems nearly collapsed in 1990 after a marketing scheme booked future contracts as current revenue, forcing layoffs and two earnings restatements, but Ellison out-fought Sybase and then Informix through the 1990s and built the dominant relational database company in the world. He stayed CEO for 37 years, stepping down in 2014 for the titles of executive chairman and chief technology officer, and by September 2025 his Oracle stake had briefly made him, on paper, the world's richest person.

He has been married six times, and the wealth built a life almost cartoonishly separate from ordinary constraint — a Japanese-style estate in Woodside, more than 180 million dollars in Malibu real estate, and a private island, since he owns 98 percent of Lanai, Hawaii, bought for half a billion dollars in 2012. Residents there have long complained about his company's short-term leases and restricted beach access. He settled a federal insider-trading suit in 2005 by donating 100 million dollars to charity without admitting wrongdoing. In the 2020s the money went into politics and foreign policy — tens of millions to Republican candidates and causes, 16.6 million dollars to the group Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in a single gift, and, according to the Washington Post, part in a November 2020 call strategizing how to challenge the election results.

The reputation has never settled into one thing. To the software industry he is the man who made the relational database a business and won it twice over on the water, funding the syndicate that brought the America's Cup back to the United States in 2010 and then defended it from an 8-1 deficit in 2013, one of the sport's great comebacks. To critics he is a case study in what unlimited money buys once ordinary consequences stop applying — an entire Hawaiian island, a board seat offered to a foreign prime minister, a stake in a Hollywood studio bought through a family trust. Both descriptions are current. Neither has driven the other one out.

Larry Ellison's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Software Development Laboratories company
  Founded with Bob Miner and Ed Oates on 2,000 dollars 1977
• Oracle relational database invention
  Among the first commercially available SQL database systems 1979
• NetSuite company
  Founding investor — Oracle bought it back in 2016 1998
• Oracle Team USA company
  His America's Cup sailing syndicate, winner in 2010 and 2013 2003

• August 17, 1944 aged 0 Born in New York City, adopted at nine months
• c. 1964 aged ~20 Withdraws from the University of Illinois after his adoptive mother's death
• 1977 aged ~33 Co-founds Software Development Laboratories, later Oracle
• 1990 aged ~46 Oracle nearly collapses over a revenue-booking scandal
• December 18, 2003 aged 59 Marries the novelist Melanie Craft Steve Jobs photographed the wedding.
• 2010 aged ~66 His sailing team wins the America's Cup
• 2012 aged ~68 Buys 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai
• 2014 aged ~70 Steps down as Oracle CEO for Safra Catz and Mark Hurd
• September 2025 aged 81 Briefly becomes, on paper, the world's richest person

• Steve Jobs 1955–2011
  Co-founder of Apple who revolutionized personal computing, music, and mobile communications. close friend, photographed his wedding
• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. longtime rival of
• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. political donor to
• Safra Catz b. 1961
  CEO of Oracle who has steered one of the world's largest enterprise software companies. successor as Oracle co-CEO