Larry Ellison

Lawrence Joseph Ellison was given up for adoption as a baby, left university twice without a degree, and built one of the largest software companies in the world on an idea he read in a research paper. Nearly fifty years later, he is still running its technology — and in 2025, briefly, he was the richest person on earth.

Adopted

He was born on 17 August 1944 in New York City to Florence Spellman, a nineteen-year-old unmarried mother. His biological father was an Italian-American air force pilot. When he was nine months old and ill with pneumonia, his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted him and raised him in a modest apartment on the South Side of Chicago.

He was twelve when he learned that he had been adopted. He has described a close relationship with his adoptive mother and a difficult one with his adoptive father, who told him repeatedly that he would never amount to anything.

Two Universities

He enrolled at the University of Illinois, where he was named science student of the year. In his second year his adoptive mother died, and he left before sitting his final exams. He then spent a term at the University of Chicago, where he first learned computer programming, and left again.

In 1966 he drove to California. He spent the next decade as a programmer at a series of companies, including the electronics firm Ampex, where he worked on a database for a client that turned out to be the CIA. The project’s code name was Oracle.

The Paper

In 1970 an IBM researcher named Edgar Codd had published a paper describing a “relational” database, which stored information in simple tables that could be searched with a common language. IBM was slow to turn the idea into a product.

Ellison read the paper and saw the opportunity. In 1977 he founded Software Development Laboratories with two colleagues, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, with about $2,000, most of it his. Miner and Oates wrote much of the code; Ellison sold it. Their first customer was, again, the CIA.

The company became Relational Software in 1979 and took the name of its product, Oracle, in 1982. Its great commercial insight was to make the database work on computers from many different manufacturers, so customers were not locked into one supplier. As businesses computerised their accounts, customers, stock and payroll, they needed somewhere to keep the data. Very often it was an Oracle database.

The Near-Collapse

Oracle went public in March 1986. It grew very fast, driven by an aggressive sales force that booked deals before they were complete. In 1990 the company had to restate its results, admitting that it had overstated its revenue. It reported its first loss, its shares fell by about 80 per cent, and shareholders sued.

Ellison came close to losing the company. He brought in experienced finance managers, tightened the controls, and gave up some of his control over day-to-day operations. Oracle recovered, and through the 1990s it became the dominant database company in the world, alongside IBM.

Buying the Industry

In the 2000s Oracle grew by acquisition. In 2005, after an eighteen-month hostile battle, it bought the business-software maker PeopleSoft for about $10 billion. It then bought Siebel Systems and dozens of other companies. In 2010 it completed the purchase of Sun Microsystems, the maker of servers and the Java programming language, for about $7.4 billion.

Ellison stepped down as chief executive in 2014, becoming executive chairman and chief technology officer. He has kept those roles and remains closely involved in Oracle’s products.

Yachts, an Island and Tesla

His personal life has been as competitive as his business. He is a keen sailor, and his team, Oracle Team USA, won the America’s Cup in 2010 and again in 2013, when it came back from 8–1 down against New Zealand to win 9–8 — one of the great comebacks in sport. In 2012 he bought most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He sat on Tesla’s board from 2018 to 2022.

He has been married four times and has two children from his third marriage: David Ellison, a film producer, and Megan Ellison, founder of the film company Annapurna Pictures. In 2020 he moved to Hawaii, and Oracle later moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas.

Late to the Cloud

In the 2000s Ellison mocked “cloud computing” as a fashion. Amazon, Microsoft and Google built huge cloud businesses while Oracle hesitated. It spent the 2010s catching up, rebuilding its infrastructure as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The AI boom changed its position. Companies training large AI models needed enormous amounts of computing power, fast. Oracle won large contracts to build and run data centres, including for OpenAI, and in January 2025 joined the Stargate project with OpenAI and SoftBank. In September 2025 Oracle reported contracted future revenue of hundreds of billions of dollars; its shares jumped by more than a third in a day, and Ellison briefly became the richest person in the world. The shares later fell sharply from that peak, as investors worried about the debt Oracle was taking on to build the data centres.

Into Media

In 2025 Skydance, the studio run by his son David and financed by the family, merged with Paramount. In January 2026 Oracle became one of three managing investors, each with a 15 per cent stake, in the new joint venture that took over TikTok’s US operations from ByteDance, with Oracle responsible for its data security.

In February 2026 Paramount Skydance agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at about $110 billion. Company filings showed that Larry Ellison had personally guaranteed about $40 billion of the equity financing.

Rivals and Lawsuits

Ellison has always defined Oracle against a rival. In the 1980s it was IBM, in the 1990s Microsoft, in the 2000s the German business-software company SAP, and later Amazon’s cloud. After buying Sun, Oracle sued Google, arguing that Android had copied parts of the Java programming language. The case lasted a decade. In 2021 the US Supreme Court ruled in Google’s favour, finding that its use was fair use.

He has also given away large sums. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010. The Ellison Medical Foundation funded research into ageing for many years, and in 2023 he announced the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, England, a large research campus working on health, food security, climate and AI.

Friends and Homes

One of his closest friends was Steve Jobs, who lived near him in California. They walked together often, and Ellison has said that he considered it his job to cheer Jobs up during his exile from Apple. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Ellison joined its board.

Oracle spent decades at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, whose round glass towers are often said to resemble database cylinders. In December 2020 it moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, and in 2024 Ellison announced that it would build a large campus in Nashville, Tennessee, which he said would eventually become its world headquarters.

The measure of him is his competitiveness. He built Oracle by beating IBM to its own idea, fought for every customer, and has kept fighting into his eighties — now in cloud computing, AI and Hollywood.

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