Larry Ellison is currently the CEO of Oracle and owns more than 100 billion euros. However, his life did not seem so successful at the beginning.
Many dream of having earned a lot of money or owning a large company by the end of their lives. For some, life is very chaotic, yet in the end, they achieve exactly that.
One of those people is Larry Ellison. Today, he leads Oracle Corporation and is among the wealthiest people in the world. MeinMMO presents his story.
Ellison fails to complete any degree, but learns programming
Larry Ellison was adopted by his uncle and aunt as a child. He was often ill as a child and suffered from a severe pneumonia. His single mother, who was only 19 at the time, sent him to his relatives, who adopted him.
He grew up in a middle-class household and did not have to worry about money, as his uncle worked in administration.
While he reportedly had a very loving relationship with his aunt, he constantly argued with his uncle. After his aunt passed away, Ellison failed his exam and dropped out of college. He then began a second degree in Chicago, but dropped out right after the first semester.
His uncle said that he would never accomplish anything. This is corroborated by several sources such as achievement.org or Britannica.com.
However, that was not meant to be true. At the university in Chicago, Ellison had already learned basic skills in computer programming. With these skills, he moved to Berkeley, California, and took various jobs over the next 8 years. Eventually, he met his colleagues Robert Miner and Ed Oates at Ampex.
After just 3 years, Ellison leads a million-dollar company
Together with Miner and Oates, Ellison founded “Software Development Labs” in 1977, with a mere start-up capital of 2000 US dollars. Together, they developed a project for the CIA under the codename Oracle.
Oracle was based on a concept by Edgar F. Codd, who described the concept of a structured query language (SQL). The concept had not really interested anyone, but Ellison saw potential in it. He therefore signed a two-year contract for the development of a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CIA.
In fact, the team completed the development after just one year. With the new experiences and the remaining time, they then developed a commercial database management system. They named this system Oracle as well.
By 1980, three years after the founding of their company, the business had only 8 employees, but it was close to breaking the million-dollar mark in revenues. When IBM licensed Oracle for mainframes in 1981, revenues doubled every year. Eventually, Ellison renamed the company to Oracle Corporation after his best-selling product at that time.
Where are the company and Ellison today? Today, Oracle offers not only its database software but also many other services. In 2020, Oracle Corporation had an annual revenue of 40.5 billion US dollars and more than 132,000 employees.
Ellison himself was listed by Forbes Magazine on the “World’s Billionaires” list in 2022 with 106 billion US dollars, at position 8.
More fascinating individuals from the tech sector: Want to read more exciting stories about individuals from the tech sector? Then check out the following article. Here we tell you about a man who was homeless for a year and a half. But today, he leads a huge company:
His parents set him on the street at 17 – Today he leads a tech company worth 1.3 billion euros
