Larry Ellison

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Larry" Ellison  is an American business magnate, co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, a major enterprise software company.

Larry Ellison was born in New York City . After Larry Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother determined that she was unable to care for him adequately, and arranged for him to be adopted by her aunt and uncle in Chicago.Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine months old.

Ellison graduated from Eugene Field Elementary School on Chicago's north side in January, 1958

Ellison grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago's South Shore middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Ellison remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving.

Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, after not taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending a summer in Northern California, where he lived with his friend Chuck Weiss, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer designing. In 1964, at 20 years of age, he moved to northern California permanently.

Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".He founded Oracle in 1977, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database.

In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because it was losing money. This crisis, which almost resulted in Oracle'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.

Although IBM dominated the mainframe relational database market with its DB2 and SQL/DS database products, it delayed entering the market for a relational database on UNIX and Windows operating systems. This left the door open for Sybase, Oracle, and Informix (and eventually Microsoft) to dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers.

In 1994, Informix Software overtook Sybase and became Oracle's most important rival. The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison was front page Silicon Valley news for three years. In April, 1997, Informix announced a major revenue shortfall and earnings

Once Informix and Sybase were defeated, Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in the late 90s and IBM's acquisition of Informix Software in 2001 to complement their DB2 database.

In April 2009, Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun Microsystems after a tug of war with IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The European Union approved the acquisition by Oracle of Sun Microsystems on January 21, 2010 and agreed that "Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products".

In 2005, Oracle paid Ellison a $975,000 salary, a $6,500,000 bonus, and other compensation of $955,100.In 2007, Ellison earned a total compensation of $61,180,524, which included a base salary of $1,000,000, a cash bonus of $8,369,000, and options granted of $50,087,100. In 2008, he earned a total compensation of $84,598,700, which included a base salary of $1,000,000, a cash bonus of $10,779,000, no stocks granted, and options granted of $71,372,700. In the year ending May 31, 2009 he made $56.8 million.

As of March 10, 2010, Ellison was listed on the Forbes list of billionaires as the sixth richest person in the world. He is the third richest American, with an estimated net worth of US $28 billion.

Ellison has been married and divorced four times.He was married to Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974. He was married to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins between 1977 and 1978. From 1983 to 1986, he was married to Barbara Boothe: two children were born of this marriage, a son and daughter named David and Megan.

On 18 December 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. His friend Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple, Inc) was the official wedding photographer, and Representative Tom Lantos officiated.

Ellison and Melanie Craft-Ellison divorced in September 2010.

Ellison recently ended his ownership of the sixth largest yacht in the world, named Rising Sun. He sold his remaining shares in the yacht to music and film mogul David Geffen. Rising Sun is 453 ft. (138 m) long, and reportedly cost over US$200 million to build.

Ellison is a financier of the BMW Oracle Racing team, which won the 2010 America's Cup.

Ellison has followed professional tennis all his life, and took up the game in 2004. In 2010, he purchased a 50% share in one of the top four tournaments in the United States, the BNP Paribas Open. This purchase saved the tournament from being sold and moved outside of the U.S.

Ellison is a licensed pilot and has owned several aircraft. Ellison owns many exotic cars, including an Audi R8 and a McLaren F1.

In early 2010 Ellison purchased the Astor's Beechwood Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island for $10.5 million. The property was the former summer home of the prominent Astor family.

In order to settle an insider trading lawsuit arising from Ellison's selling nearly $1 billion of Oracle stock, he was allowed to donate $100 million to his own charitable foundation

In August 2010 it was reported that Ellison is one of the 40 billionaires who has signed "The Giving Pledge"

( Courtesy: Wikkipedia)