Larry Ellison

Ellison has been married 4 times. His first marriage was with Adda Quinn (1967-74); second to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins (1977-78), then to Barbara Boothe (1983-86) and had two children: David and Megan, and fourth to Melanie Craft (2003-2010).

Larry Ellison was born in New York City to an unmarried teen mother of Jewish heritage. He developed pneumonia when he was 9 months old, which is why his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption.

He was brought up on the south side of New York City and did not know until 12 that he was adopted. He attended the Eugene Field Elementary School in Chicago and later went to Sullivan High School.

His adoptive father, Louis Ellison, had a small real estate business in Chicago but lost all of that during the Great Depression. Young Ellison did not go along very well with him as he was distant and unaccommodating.

Although Ellison was raised in a religious household and often attended synagogue but he grew up to become a religious skeptic who did not believe in the conventional religious dogmas. He refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration when he was 13.

Ellison enrolled at the University of Illinois but dropped out of college when his adoptive mother passed away. Later he went to the University of Chicago but soon dropped out of there too.

After dropping out of the university, Ellison, during 1970s, started working with the Ampex Corporation. He worked to develop databases, in particular for CIA; a program that he named ‘Oracle’.

In 1977, Ellison founded his own company under the name of ‘Software Development Laboratories (SDL)’. He started it with two other partners and invested about 2000 US dollars in it, initially.

In the late ‘70s and early ’80, Ellison renamed his company as ‘Relational Software Inc.’, which went on to become ‘Oracle Systems Corporation’, named after its patent invention ‘Oracle’ database.

He wanted his creation Oracle to achieve compatibility with the newly formed IBM System Inc., which was like Oracle based on Codd’s theories, but IBM refused to share System R’s code.

In 1990, Oracle started losing money in the business and laid off about 10% of its working staff. This situation emerged due to Oracle’s marketing techniques.

Ellison’s most important work of his career is considered to be his invention of ‘Oracle’ database, which led to the foundation of his company, ‘Oracle Systems Corporation. This has made him the third richest businessman in America.