Born in Manhattan, 1944 to an unwed 19-year-old, Larry Ellison had a tough start.
Adopted by distant relatives he relocated to windswept Chicago and emerged from high school an unruly, yet undeniably intelligent teenager.
Despite his obvious smarts Ellison didn’t enjoy structured authoritarian education. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign could only hold him back briefly, and the University of Chicago for a mere term.
He’s a leader, a doer, an enigma – but never a follower. In short, a success – a natural born CEO.
Having dropped out, he tuned in. In 1977 he founded Oracle, stumping up $2k of his own cash. With the release of the Oracle 2 database, Ellison’s baby exploded into the second largest software company in the world. There wasn’t an Oracle 1, but Ellison had the chutzpah to run with it because a ‘second edition’ sounded like an improvement.
For a short period in 2000, Ellison was the richest man in the world
And it worked. For a short period in 2000, Ellison was the richest man in the world, although now he has fallen into relative penury, being only the ninth richest man in the world with a measly fortune of $18.4bn.
Ellison claims even this figure is misleading, saying that in terms of disposable cash he only has $2bn. Poor man.
Ellison could not be much more different from Bill Gates, his rival in business and in the Forbes rich-list table. Gates is the archetypal computer nerd: bespectacled, poorly dressed and not exactly handsome. Ellison, by contrast, wears classy suits, chases women and aggravates the city of San Jose with his noisy private jet. Gates feels ill at ease being the world’s richest man; Ellison is likely to have enjoyed his brief spell at the summit of the Forbes chart.
With a private jet, a $200m home and the third largest yacht in the world, Silicon Valley has been kind to the iconic Ellison.
The boom may be over, but Larry is far from finished.
