Lawrence Joseph Ellison is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist who is known as the co-founder and executive chairman of of Oracle Corporation, a computer technology that specializes in developing and marketing database software and technology, cloud systems, and enterprise software.
Early years and education
Lawrence Ellison was born on August 17, 1944 in Bronx, New York City and grew up in Chicago. At nine months old, he came down with pneumonia and was brought to Chicago by his mother to be adopted by his aunt and uncle. He did not meet his biological mother until he was 48. Ellison attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the University of Chicago but did not graduate and eventually moved to California in 1966.
Career
In the 1970s, Ellison did various jobs at different companies like Wells Fargo and Amdahl Corporation. This is also the time he learned basic computer skills until he learned programming and worked as a programmer at Amdahl. He worked on the very first IBM-compatible mainframe system. In 1977, Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two colleagues with a $2,000 investment; $1,200 was his own money.
Oracle
In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., and in 1982, it officially became Oracle Systems Corporation which was named after its flagship product, the Oracle Database. The
company had less than 10 employees and revenue of less than $1 million per year.
In 1981, IBM used Oracle and this was the start of the company’s increase in sales. Their sales doubled every year for the next seven years.
In 1986, Oracle Corporation help its IPO but due to some accounting issues, majority of the company’s market capitalization was endangered and Oracle almost faced bankruptcy. In 1990, Oracle laid off almost 10% of its employees due to the crisis.
The company re-thought its business model and released new products that took the industry by storm, and in 1992, the company was back in the game and became the leader in database-management system. Ellison was the company’s largest shareholder and became one of the wealthiest people in the world.
In 1994, Informix became Oracle’s greatest competitor – Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison became rivals. Phil White was eventually imprisoned and Informix was acquired by IBM in 2001.
In 1997, Ellison also became a director of Apple computer but he resigned in 2002 due to conflict in schedule. Due to Oracle’s triumph over Informix, Oracle dominated the industry until the creation of Microsft SQL.
Earnings
In 2005, Ellison received $975,000 salary, a $6,500,000 bonus, and other compensation of $955,100 from Oracle. In 2007, he earned a total compensation of $61,180,524 and in 2008, he earned a total compensation of $84,598,700. In 2009, he made $56.8 million. In 2006, Ellison was ranked as the richest man in California by Forbes.
Success continued for Oracle and it reached a market cap of about $185 billion with around 130,000 employees by 2014.
Net Worth
Larry Ellison’s net worth as of February 2019 is $63.8 billion.