Terrific
CEO of
ORACLE, board member of
Apple, owner of a
Japanese castle and slave to several
cats. Born in New York City, to a single mom, who gave him up to her brother Louis in
Chicago (who took his name from
Ellis Island), Larry grew up in a second-floor walk-up on the South Side. In the late 60's, he travelled to California, where he worked on several computing jobs until joining with two friends to form the Oracle Corporation in
1977, now the world's second-largest software company, and largest database company overall. Its flagship product, also called Oracle, is a
relational database based on
SQL, and as such, handles the data for busnesses large (
Mc Donald's) and small. It also warehouses data for
at least one government agency.
Now, on the top of the heap, he flies a Marchetti trainer jet and races the Sayonara, an 80-foot carbon-fiber sailboat. His personal style is to die for: sleek Armani suits, a copy of the Kasuri Imperial Villa, in Atherton, CA (and a copy of a 17th century samurai castle in the works) surrounded by extensive gardens, a collection of Japanese arms and armor that is rumored to be the best outside Japan, and many other cool details. He met his best bud, Steve Jobs after a tiff in which Ellison's cats had a run-in with Jobs's pet peacock.
A loser as much as a winner, he's hyped the Network Computer, Beenz, an Internet currency, and several other projects that fizzled, as well as a relationship with Adelyn Lee, a gold-digging former employee who charged him with sexual misconduct when the love affair went sour. He's also phenomenally accident-prone, having splintered one arm above the elbow falling off his bicycle and cracking a neck vertebra while surfing. He also brought the Sayonara through the disasterous 1998 Sydney-to-Hobart race, where only a third of the boats finished and many sailors lost their lives.
His latest project to fund genetic research into aging. Perhaps, if in future time, people live for 150 years, we will have him to thank. In closing, I would like to say that he, not Bill Gates is more like the description of 666 in the Apocalypse: a master of data, with several heads, stricken as if to die, but renewing itself, and a master of illusion as a friend. Funny thing, I like Ellison....