Larry Ellison is an American businessman and co-founder of the leading software company Oracle Corporation. Ellison is one of Silicon Valley's most polarising individuals, praised for his enormous success but reviled for his harsh business practises and extravagant spending.
He was born to a nineteen year old single parent and was sent to live with his aunt and uncle and was later adopted by them. He enrolled at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1962 but quit school shortly after his aunt's death.
He then moved to California and worked as a computer programmer for a number of organisations for the following many years. He began working at the electronics firm Ampex in 1973, when he met fellow programmer Ed Oates and was mentored by Bob Miner. In 1976, Ellison left Ampex to become vice president of research and development at Precision Instruments (later Omex).
One of his efforts was a database for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that he dubbed "Oracle." "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," a work by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems, inspired Ellison. He created Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977 with two partners and a $2,000 investment, of which $1,200 was his.
Ellison, Miner, and Oates set out to create and market a data-management tool based on Codd's idea. They were given a contract by the CIA to construct a database, and they started working on a commercial relational database programme. Oracle, the first commercial relational database application to use Structured Query Language (SQL), was introduced in 1979 by the business (now known as Relational Software, Inc.), and the versatile database tool immediately became popular.
The company grew rapidly in the 1980s and within a span of an year it became the largest database management company in the world. But later in the 1990s, an audit report reflected that the company had overstated its earnings and in return, the company's stocks plunched dramatically. But the crisis did not last long and Ellison fixed the financial health of the company and made its appearance in the market again in the year 1992.
In the mid-1990s, Ellison saw an opportunity to compete with Microsoft Corporation by developing the Network Computer(NC), a low-cost alternative to the desktop personal computer (PC). In an early version of what would later be known as cloud computing, the NC was not as well-equipped as a regular PC and relied on computer servers for its data and software.
However, due to ongoing price drops in PCs and delays in the NC's development, PCs running the Microsoft Windows operating system remained the most popular choice among business customers' desktops. Later, Ellison conceded that the NC was technologically ahead of its time.
With his early embrace of the Internet, Ellison had more success. Oracle created products that were compatible with Web technologies, allowing the company to expand. In the early 2000s, Ellison launched Oracle with the goal of acquiring competing software companies. Several multibillion-dollar acquisitions were made, including PeopleSoft (2005), Siebel (2006), BEA (2008), and Sun Microsystems (2010).
Ellison purchased 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012. Later in 2014, he stepped down as the chief executive officer but remained intact with the organisation as executive chairman and chief technology officer. With a fortune of $93.9 billion, increased from $57.3 billion in 2018, he was listed by Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the ninth-wealthiest person in the United States and as the tenth-wealthiest in the world.
