Larry Ellison, an American Businessman, and Entrepreneur is a co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation.
In 2014, after completing a journey of 37 years of CEO, step-downed. Oracle corporation grew in part through steady acquisitions of software companies. In 2016, Oracle got cloud revenue of $ 9.3 billion for NetSuite.
Larry spent his childhood in a two-room apartment in southern Chicago. Larry's father was an ex-pat from the Crimea. He took the name Ellison to hide his Jewish origin. Louis was a modest civil servant who made real estate in Chicago and lost it during the Great Depression.
Larry was an independent adolescent, which often led to civil war between him and his adoptive father. During his childhood, his adoptive father repeatedly told him "he was good for nothing." He dropped out of college twice- first from the University of Illinois and then the University of Chicago. Later, he moved to California and started working odd jobs.
He says, "I never took computer science classes in my life. I started a job working as a programmer; I loved self-learning, took a book, and started learning to program."
He got a programming job at Ampex Corporation, and his responsibility was to build a database for the CIA. In 1977, two more employers along with him left the company and started a database management company.
No one would believe in a new brand, so Larry and his co-founders named the first version has Oracle Version 2.0.
Their idea worked, and they got their first biggest client: the CIA. It later becomes the most popular database company. His hard work paid off, and he became the highest-paid executive in the US before he stepped down from his CEO post in 2014.
In 1980, Oracle had only eight employees. Their income was less than a million. After 15 years, they got a breakthrough, when IBM began to install Oracle, and over a year, Oracle's sales doubled. In 1986, Oracle become a public company, and its public valuation was $31.5 million.
But his goal was never to be a billionaire. He told the Smithsonian University, "When I started Oracle, my goal was to create an environment where I could enjoy working. I wanted to make a living but never expected to become rich, not this rich."
Now at 70, Ellison has a lifestyle that he never dreamed of during his childhood or college time. " This is kind of surreal," he told Mike Wilson, the author of "The difference between God and Larry Ellison." "I don't believe it now, Not even now when, I look around, I say, this must be something out of a dream."
Ellison collects cars and private jets, and his own America's Cup sailing team. He has an incredible real estate portfolio includes a private golf club in Rancho Mirage, California. A $70 million house in Silicon Valley; a former summer home of the Astor family in Newport, Rhode Island; a historic garden villa in Kyoto, Japan; and an entire Hawaiian island of Lanai.
He loves basketball, so he installed a court on at least of his yachts.