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Lawrence Joseph Larry Ellison is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Oracle Corporation.

World number 4 richest man and database titan Lawrence J. Ellison was born on August 17, 1944 in the Bronx, New York City in a Jewish family. At the age of 9 month he was contracted by pneumonia. So his 19 year’s old unmarried mother fined it difficult to nursing him. She requested her aunt and uncle in Chicago to raise him. At the request of his mother, Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was only nine months old. Until he was twelve years old he did not know that he was adopted. Ellison did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48; the identity of his father is unknown.
Ellison grew up in Chicago’s in a two-bedroom apartment. His father was a modest government employee.

Ellison graduated from Eugene Field Elementary School, Chicago and attended Sullivan High School. Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. After his adoptive mother had just died he left the University of Illinois at the end of his second year with out taking part in final exams. Then he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer designing.

Ellison started his carrier in Ampex Corporation during 1970s in a database for the CIA, which he named “Oracle”. A paper on relational database systems called “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” written by Edgar F. Codd inspired him, and he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977, putting up only $2000 of his own money, In 1979, SDL was renamed as Relational Software Inc., later on renamed as Oracle.

In 1990, Oracle was suffering with mismatch between cash and revenues and lay off 10% i.e., about 400 of its work force. Later Ellison says that Oracle had made “an incredible business mistake.”

During 1990-1993, Sybase was the fastest growing database company and Oracle fell behind Sybase. But in 1993 Sybase’s merger with Power soft, as a result they lost their focus from their core database technology and sold the rights to its database software to Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft is now marketing that product under the banner of “SQL Server.”

In 1994, Informix Software overtook Sybase in 1994 and become competitor of Oracle. But ultimately, Oracle defeated Informix. In 1997 Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer.

Once Informix and Sybase were defeated, Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance.

Ellison’s earning from Oracle: (in us $)

In the year ending May 31, 2009 he made $56.8 million. For the fourth year in a row, Oracle’s Board awarded Ellison another 7 million stock options on July 2, 2009.

A report published on August 22, 2009 said that for the fiscal year of 2010 Ellison would be paid only $1 for his base salary, down from the $1,000,000 he was paid in fiscal 2009.

According to Forbes list Ellison’s was the ninth richest man in the world in 2005 and his net worth was estimated as $18.4 billion. According to Forbes list of billionaires Currently (as of March 11, 2009) he is the fourth richest person in the world and third richest American, with an estimated net worth of $22.5 billion.

Now Ellison owns 22.59% of Oracle’s shares which worth between 20 to 25 billion dollars.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia