Larry Ellison
Lawrence " Larry " Joseph Ellison ( born August 17, 1944 in the Bronx, New York City ) is the founder and President ( CEO) of the U.S. software company Oracle and is currently (as of March 2013) with assets of $ 36.0 billion U.S. dollars in 5th place on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world.
His company had originally specialized in software for data management and now serves also very strong market segment for enterprise solutions. Main competitor is SAP.
Origin
His mother, Florence Ellison, gave birth to him at the age of 19 years as an illegitimate child. Due to these circumstances she gave him after nine months with relatives in Chicago from. There he grew up with his Aunt Lilian, the second wife of his stepfather Louis Ellison, a Russian who had emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century.
In 1962, he dropped out of high school and began the same year at the University of Illinois in Champaign with the study of mathematics.
When his stepmother died in 1966, he fell through all the final exam and therefore left the university without a degree.
Career
In 1967 he married his first wife, Adda Quinn, who studied teaching. In the following years he went to various activities at computer companies. Since not particularly asked him the nature of these activities, mainly to change backup tapes, he read up on the basis of detailed knowledge of several books on topics related to computer science.
In 1974 he studied with activities in the Ampex company (Multimedia ) his later -founder Bob Miner and Ed Oates know. There, the three dealt among other things with the then technical programming problem of very limited storage devices. This problem remained unresolved during her tenure there; Ellison and Oates left the company. Ellison developed yet in the same year, then for the company, Precision Instrument Company is a powerful memory management system. In 1974 it came to the divorce from his first wife.
In the following years, Ellison developed his database program further, but it was too memory- consuming for the former computer. In a conversation with his neighbors he recognized the potential of the software and advised him for further development.
After Ellison had married for the second time in 1976, he founded in 1977 with a capital stock of $ 2,000, together with Oates and Miner in Silicon Valley, the company Software Development Laboratories, which is known under the name Oracle today. Held for the implementation of the in-progress database system start-up difficulties, the founder of not buying a VAX from, the then leading scientific calculator system.
The following year, 1979, the database system has been enhanced so that it was usable on several different computer architectures. The company was renamed Relational Software Inc., before she learned a new name change: Today's Oracle was chosen as a reference to the main product, the Oracle database.
Ellison's personal success goes hand in hand with his company's low point was the dismissal of 10 % of all employees (about 4000) 1990 financial climax of the listings among the richest people in the world by Forbes Magazine.
Estimated assets
In U.S. dollar terms, according to the list of the richest people in the world by Forbes Magazine:
Private life
Ellison was four times verheirat. All marriages ended in divorce.
- Adda Quinn (1967-1974)
- Nancy Wheeler Jenkins (1977-1978) Ellison had divorced her after 18 months of marriage.
- Barbara Boothe ( 1983-1986). From this marriage the children of David Ellison and Megan Ellison emerged, both of which operate as a film producer.
- Melanie Craft (2003-2010), writer
Among other things, Ellison was co-owner of the currently ninth largest yacht in the world, the Rising Sun, with a value of about 200 million U.S. dollars. With his team BMW Oracle Racing Ellison successfully participated in the America's Cup in part, lifted the trophy back in 2010 and successfully defended it in 2013.
In June 2010 he joined the philanthropic campaign The Giving Pledge billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and promised to donate 95 % of its assets for charitable purposes.
For Oracle's business relationship with the NSA
During an interview with CBS News, which originally Ellison / Oracle should treat view of a legal dispute with Google, he commented on the question whether he saw critical that the NSA Oracle products in the facts revealed in surveillance scandal 2013, measures and programs U.S. government may establish:
" It's great. It's great. It is of great importance. The way, President Obama believes it is important. It is important if you want that such attacks as just in Boston be minimized. It is absolutely necessary. "
He expressed confidence in the democratically elected government, stating: "If we do not like, which makes the NSA, we can simply get rid of the government and install a new "
A red line would be exceeded if the government used the data "to track down political opinions. If the Democrats used it to fight against the Republicans. If the Republicans used it to take action against Democrats. In other words, if we would stop looking for terrorists and would begin to track people on the other side of the aisle. "
The interview concluded with his question
"Who has ever heard of it, that the U.S. government has misused the information?"
And the note, credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard activities for years comparable.