Age, Biography, and Wiki
Larry Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in New York City. His early life was marked by challenges; he was adopted by his maternal aunt and uncle after being diagnosed with pneumonia. He grew up in the South Shore region of Chicago and developed a keen interest in technology and business. Ellison attended the University of Illinois and University of Chicago but did not complete his degrees from either institution. More details about his life are available on his Wikipedia page.
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 17 August 1944 |
| Age | 80 Years |
| Birth Place | New York City, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Leo |
| Country | U.S |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited information available about Larry Ellison's height, weight, and other physical measurements. Frequently, such details are not widely reported for figures like Ellison unless they are directly relevant to their public persona or career.
| Height | |
| Weight | |
| Body Measurements | |
| Eye Color | |
| Hair Color |
Dating & Relationship Status
Larry Ellison has been married four times. His personal life has been quite eventful, with marriages to Adda Quinn (1967–1974), Nancy Wheeler Jenkins (1977–1978), Barbara Boothe (1983–1986), and Melanie Craft (2003–2010). He does not publicly disclose his current relationship status, focusing more on his professional life.
His biological father was an Italian-American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption. He did not meet his biological mother again until he was 48.
Ellison moved to Chicago's South Shore, then a primarily Jewish middle-class neighborhood. He remembers his adoptive mother, Lillian Spellman Ellison, as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, who had chosen the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the United States, Ellis Island. Louis Ellison was a government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression.
Although Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive parents, who attended synagogue regularly, he remained a religious skeptic. At age 13, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration. Ellison states: "While I think I am religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not dogmas I subscribe to. I don't believe that they are real. They're interesting stories. They're interesting mythology, and I certainly respect people who believe these are literally true, but I don't. I see no evidence for this stuff." Ellison says that his fondness for Israel is not connected to religious sentiments but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis in the technology sector.
Ellison attended South Shore High School in Chicago and later was admitted to University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was enrolled as a pre-med student. At the university, he was named science student of the year. He withdrew without taking final exams after his sophomore year because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending the summer of 1966 in California, he then attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he studied physics and mathematics and also first encountered computer design. He then moved to Berkeley, California, and began his career as a computer programmer for different companies.
* 5) From 2010 until 2020, Ellison was in a relationship and then fifth marriage with Ukrainian-American model and actress Nikita Kahn. They divorced in 2020.
| Parents | |
| Husband | 1= Adda Quinn (m. 1967-1974) Nancy Wheeler Jenkins (m. 1977-1978) Barbara Boothe (m. 1983-1986) Melanie Craft (m. 2003-2010) Nikita Kahn Jolin (Keren) Zhu (m. 2023) |
| Sibling | |
| Children |
Net Worth and Salary
As of May 2025, Larry Ellison's net worth is estimated to be around $216.9 billion, making him one of the richest individuals globally, often ranked just behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos . His wealth is largely attributed to his significant stake in Oracle Corporation, where he owns approximately 40% of the company. In his peak years as CEO, Ellison was recognized as one of the highest-paid executives in the world .
As of May 2025, Ellison is the fourth-wealthiest person in the world, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated net worth of US$189 billion, and the fourth-wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes, with an estimated net worth of US$203.9 billion. Ellison is also known for his ownership of 98% of Lānaʻi, the sixth-largest island in the Hawaiian Islands.
In 1979, the company renamed itself Relational Software, Inc. (RSI). Ellison had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to achieve compatibility with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's error codes. The initial release of the Oracle Database in 1979 was called Oracle version 2; there was no Oracle version 1. In 1983, the company officially became Oracle Systems Corporation after its flagship product. In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% of its workforce (about 400 people) because it was losing money. This crisis, which almost resulted in the company'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. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and had to settle class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison would later say that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake".
In 1994, Informix 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 restatements. Phil White eventually landed in jail, and IBM absorbed Informix in 2001. Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs returned to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002. With the defeat of Informix and of Sybase, Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in the late 1990s and IBM's acquisition of Informix Software in 2001 to complement their DB2 database. As of 2013 Oracle's main competition for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems comes from IBM's DB2 and from Microsoft SQL Server. IBM's DB2 still dominates the mainframe database market.
In 2005, Oracle Corporation 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 stock grants, and options granted of $71,372,700. In the year ending May 31, 2009, he made $56.8 million. In 2006, Forbes ranked him as the richest Californian. In April 2009, after a tug-of-war with IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun Microsystems. On July 2, 2009, for the fourth year in a row, Oracle's board awarded Ellison another 7 million stock options. On August 22, 2009, it was reported that Ellison would be paid only $1 for his base salary for the fiscal year of 2010, down from the $1,000,000 he was paid in fiscal 2009.
In March 2010, the Forbes list of billionaires ranked Ellison as the sixth-richest person in the world and as the third-richest American, with an estimated net worth of over $28 billion. On July 27, 2010, The Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison was the highest-paid executive in the last decade, collecting a total compensation of US$1.84 billion. In September 2011, Ellison was listed on the Forbes list of billionaires as the fifth richest man in the world and was still the third richest American, with a net worth of about $36.5 billion. In September 2012, Ellison was again listed on the Forbes list of billionaires as the third richest American citizen, behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, with a net worth of $44 billion. In October 2012, he was listed just behind David Hamilton Koch as the eighth richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ellison owns stakes in Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Quark Biotechnology Inc. and Astex Pharmaceuticals. In June 2012, Ellison agreed to buy 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi from David Murdock's company, Castle & Cooke. The price was reported to be between $500 million and $600 million. In 2013, according to The Wall Street Journal, Ellison earned $94.6 million. On September 18, 2014, Ellison appointed Mark Hurd to CEO of Oracle from his former position as president; Safra Catz was also made CEO, moving from her former role as CFO. Ellison assumed the positions of chief technology officer and executive chairman.
To settle an insider trading lawsuit arising from his selling nearly $1 billion of Oracle stock, a court allowed Ellison to donate $100 million to his own charitable foundation without admitting wrongdoing. A California judge refused to allow Oracle to pay Ellison's legal fees of $24 million. Ellison's lawyer had argued that if Ellison were to pay the fees, that could be construed as an admission of guilt. His charitable donations to Stanford University raised questions about the independence of two Stanford professors who evaluated the case's merits for Oracle. In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001, Ellison made a controversial offer to donate software to the federal government that would have enabled it to build and run a national identification database and to issue ID cards.
Forbes' 2004 list of charitable donations made by the wealthiest 400 Americans stated that Ellison had donated $151,092,103, about 1% of his estimated personal wealth. In June 2006, Ellison announced he would not honor his earlier pledge of $115 million to Harvard University, claiming it was due to the departure of former president Lawrence Summers. Oracle spokesman Bob Wynne announced, "It was really Larry Summers' brainchild and once it looked like Larry Summers was leaving, Larry Ellison reconsidered ... [I]t was Larry Ellison and Larry Summers that had initially come up with this notion." In 2007 Ellison pledged $500,000 to fortify a community centre in Sderot, Israel, after discovering that the building was not fortified against rocket attacks. Other charitable donations by Ellison include a $10 million donation to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in 2014. In 2017 Ellison again donated to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, this time for $16.6 million. His donation was intended to support the construction of well-being facilities on a new campus for co-ed conscripts.
Career, Business, and Investments
Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977, and under his leadership, the company grew into a global technology powerhouse. He stepped down as CEO in 2014 but remains influential as executive chairman and chief technology officer. Oracle has expanded significantly through strategic acquisitions, including the purchase of Cerner in 2021 for $28.3 billion. Ellison has also made notable investments in companies like Salesforce.com and Hawaiian real estate, notably purchasing nearly 98% of the island of Lānaʻi .
Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and entrepreneur who co-founded software company Oracle Corporation. He was Oracle's chief executive officer from 1977 to 2014 and is now its chief technology officer and executive chairman.
During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His first project included a database for the CIA, code-named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.
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, Ingres, Informix, and eventually Microsoft to dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers. Around this time, Oracle fell behind Sybase. From 1990 to 1993, Sybase was the fastest-growing database company and the database industry's darling vendor, but soon it fell victim to merger mania. Sybase's 1996 merger with Powersoft resulted in a loss of focus on its core database technology. In 1993, Sybase sold the rights to its database software running under the Windows operating system to Microsoft Corporation, which now markets it under the name "SQL Server".
In his early years at Oracle, Ellison was named an Award Recipient in the High Technology Category for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Program.
The European Union approved Oracle's acquisition 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". The Sun acquisition also gave Oracle control of the popular MySQL open source database, which Sun had acquired in 2008. On August 9, 2010, Ellison denounced Hewlett-Packard's board for firing CEO Mark Hurd, writing that: "The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago." (Ellison and Hurd were close personal friends.) Then on September 6, Oracle hired Mark Hurd as co-president alongside Safra Catz. Ellison remained in his current role at Oracle.
In December 2018, Ellison became a director on the board of Tesla, Inc., after purchasing 3 million shares earlier that year. Ellison left the Tesla Board in August 2022.
Ellison's software startup, Project Ronin, that he co-founded with David Agus and Dave Hodgson closed down in 2024. The company aimed at transforming cancer care whose products were intended to quickly analyze data within electronic medical records systems.
In 2017, Ellison funded a farming company called Sensei Ag with a promise to use AI, robotics, and software to remake the way people around the world eat. A Wall Street Journal report in February 2025, criticized the effort by saying that the whole endeavor was not keeping its promise due to some basic mistakes on choice of technology, leadership, and having access to know how.
In 2019, Ellison, in conjunction with Russell Coutts, started the SailGP international racing series. The series used F50 foiling catamarans, the fastest class of boat in history with regattas held across the globe. Ellison committed to five years of funding to support the series until it could become self sustaining. The first season was successful with global audiences of over 1.8 billion.
According to reports in 2019, Larry Ellison has contributed to funding an archaeological excavation project in East Jerusalem that received criticism from Palestinians as well as Israeli peace activists and some archaeologists. Additionally, in 2019 a $1 billion lawsuit was filed against several Israel supporters, including Ellison. The lawsuit accused Ellison and others of conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories, committing war crimes, and funding genocide. The case was dismissed in February 2024.
* 2) Ellison married Nancy Wheeler Jenkins shortly after meeting her in late 1976. In 1978, the couple divorced and Wheeler sold back her shares in SDL to Ellison for $500.
* 4) On December 18, 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. Ellison's friend Steve Jobs, former CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., was the official wedding photographer, and Representative Tom Lantos officiated. They divorced in 2010.
Social Network
Larry Ellison is not particularly active on social media platforms, preferring to keep a low profile outside of his professional endeavors. His personal life and philanthropic activities are rarely discussed in the public domain.
With the economic downturn of 2010, Ellison sold his share of Rising Sun, the 12th largest yacht in the world, making David Geffen the sole owner. The vessel is 453 ft long, and reportedly cost over $200million to build. He downsized to Musashi, a 288 ft yacht built by Feadship.
The Washington Post reported in May 2022 that Ellison participated in a conference call days after the 2020 presidential election that focused on strategies for challenging the legitimacy of the vote. Other participants on the call included Fox News host Sean Hannity, Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow and James Bopp, an attorney for True the Vote. The Post cited court documents and a participant on the call.
Ellison reportedly lobbied Israeli mogul Arnon Milchan to drop his lawyer so that Netanyahu, implicated in one of his corruption cases, could hire him. It was also revealed in 2021 that Ellison offered Netanyahu a post at Oracle.
Education
Ellison attended the University of Illinois and later the University of Chicago, though he did not graduate from either institution. Despite not completing formal education, he developed strong business acumen and technological expertise that have been instrumental in his success.
In 1992 Ellison shattered his elbow in a high-speed bicycle crash. After receiving treatment at University of California, Davis, Ellison donated $5 million to seed the Lawrence J. Ellison Musculo-Skeletal Research Center. In 1998, the Lawrence J. Ellison Ambulatory Care Center opened on the Sacramento campus of the UC Davis Medical Center.
In May 2016 Ellison donated $200 million to the University of Southern California for establishing a cancer research center: the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC. It was renamed the Ellison Institute of Technology, and an additional campus was established in Oxford in 2023 with the intention of providing a scholarship program for twenty students each year.
In 2011 he purchased the 249-acre Porcupine Creek Estate and private golf course in Rancho Mirage, California, for $42.9 million. The property was formerly the home of Yellowstone Club founders Edra and Tim Blixseth, and was sold to Ellison by creditors following their divorce and bankruptcy.
Conclusion
Larry Ellison's remarkable career and personal life serve as a testament to his dedication and vision in the tech industry. From his challenging childhood to becoming one of the world's wealthiest individuals, Ellison's story is truly inspiring. His leadership at Oracle and his strategic investments have cemented his position as a business icon.
