Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison is the co-founder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, one of the most important software companies in history. A college dropout with extraordinary ambition, Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 with just $2,000 and built it into a global technology powerhouse. His early bet on relational database technology proved transformative — Oracle's database software became the backbone of enterprise computing, powering everything from banks and hospitals to governments and airlines.

Ellison's competitive intensity and strategic brilliance have kept Oracle at the forefront of enterprise technology for nearly five decades. Under his leadership, Oracle expanded from databases into enterprise applications, middleware, cloud infrastructure, and hardware through a series of masterful acquisitions including PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, Sun Microsystems, and NetSuite. His more recent pivot to cloud infrastructure and partnership with AI leaders has positioned Oracle for continued relevance in the age of artificial intelligence.

Beyond technology, Ellison is a world-class sailor, aviator, and philanthropist. He led Oracle Team USA to victory in the America's Cup, founded the Ellison Medical Foundation to fund aging and infectious disease research, and has donated hundreds of millions to medical research and education. His estate on the Hawaiian island of Lanai has become a laboratory for sustainability and community development.

Larry Ellison's origin story reads like a novel. Born in 1944 in New York City to an unwed mother, he was adopted at nine months by his great-aunt and great-uncle on Chicago's South Side. His adoptive father, Louis Ellison, was a Russian immigrant who lost his fortune in the Great Depression and never let his adopted son forget it. Despite a difficult home life, Ellison was a voracious reader and showed early aptitude for science and math. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but dropped out after his adoptive mother's death. He enrolled at the University of Chicago for one semester before dropping out again. He then drove to Berkeley, California, with very little money, working odd jobs as a programmer while teaching himself computer science. In 1977, after reading Edgar F. Codd's landmark paper on relational databases, Ellison saw an opportunity that IBM had been slow to commercialize — and founded Software Development Laboratories, the company that would become Oracle.