Larry Ellison

Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and entrepreneur who co-founded the software company Oracle Corporation. He was Oracle's chief executive officer from 1977 to 2014 and is now its chief technology officer and executive chairman. He is a centibillionaire and the second-richest person in the world as of November 2025.

On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $393 billion. Ellison is also known for his ownership of 98 percent of Lanai, the sixth-largest island in the Hawaiian Islands.

Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in New York City to a Jewish mother, Florence Spellman. His biological father was an Italian-American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption. He did not meet Spellman again until he was 48.

Ellison moved with his adoptive parents to Chicago's South Shore, then a primarily Jewish middle-class neighborhood. He remembers his adoptive mother, Lillian Spellman Ellison, as warm and loving. He found his adoptive father, Louis Ellison, to be austere, unsupportive, and often distant. A government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression, Louis had chosen his last name to honor Ellis Island, his point of entry into the United States.

Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive parents, who attended synagogue regularly, but he remained a religious skeptic. At age 13, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration. Ellison said: "While I think I am religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not dogmas I subscribe to. I don't believe that they are real. They're interesting stories. They're interesting mythology, and I certainly respect people who believe these are literally true, but I don't. I see no evidence for this stuff." Ellison says that his fondness for Israel is not connected to religious sentiments but rather due to Israelis' innovative spirit in the technology sector.

Ellison attended South Shore High School in Chicago, was admitted to University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and enrolled as a pre-med student. At the university, he was named science student of the year. He withdrew without taking final exams after his sophomore year because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending the summer of 1966 in California, he then attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he studied physics and mathematics and also first encountered computer design. He then moved to Berkeley, California, and began his career as a computer programmer for several different companies.

During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His first project included a database for the CIA, code-named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his. Although he had strong technical skills—Ellison was not officially categorized as a developer until about 1984—the founders decided that as the others were stronger technically, he would run sales.

In 1979, the company renamed itself Relational Software, Inc. (RSI). Ellison had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to achieve compatibility with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's error codes. The initial release of the Oracle Database in 1979 was called Oracle version 2; there was no Oracle version 1. In 1983, the company officially became Oracle Systems Corporation after its flagship product. In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% of its workforce (about 400 people) because it was losing money. This crisis, which almost resulted in the company's bankruptcy, came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This became a problem when the future sales failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and had to settle class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison later said that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake".