Larry Ellison

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Larry Ellison, 2012.

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Larry Ellison (born August 17, 1944, New York City, New York) is an American businessman and entrepreneur who cofounded the software company Oracle Corporation (ORCL) and was its chief executive officer (CEO) from 1977 to 2014. As of 2025, he was the company’s executive chair and chief technology officer (CTO).

Ellison’s mother, Florence Spellman, was a 19-year-old single parent. After he had a bout of pneumonia at the age of nine months, she sent him to Chicago to live with her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted him. He attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign from 1962 but dropped out in 1964 shortly after Lillian’s death; he had been very close to his adoptive mother but had a much more difficult relationship with Louis, who often told him that he would never amount to anything. Larry then briefly attended the University of Chicago in 1966.

He went to California and spent the next several years as a computer programmer for various companies. Beginning in 1973, he worked at the electronics company Ampex, where he met fellow programmer Ed Oates and was supervised by Bob Miner. Ellison left Ampex in 1976 and later joined Precision Instruments (later Omex), where he was vice president of research and development.

In 1977 Ellison joined with Miner and Oates to form Software Development Laboratories (SDL), which was created to do contract programming for other companies. Ellison wanted SDL to do more. Inspired by a research paper written by British-born computer scientist Edgar F. Codd that outlined a relational database model, Ellison and his colleagues saw commercial potential in the approach, which organized large amounts of data in a way that allowed for efficient storage and quick retrieval.

Ellison, Miner, and Oates set to work developing and marketing a program based on Codd’s data-management theory. They received a contract from the Central Intelligence Agency to develop a database, and they began working on a commercial relational database program. In 1979, the company (now called Relational Software, Inc.) released Oracle, the earliest commercial relational database program to use Structured Query Language (SQL), and the versatile database program quickly became popular.

Known for innovation and aggressive marketing, the company, renamed Oracle Systems Corporation (later Oracle Corporation) in 1982 after its flagship product, grew rapidly throughout the 1980s, going public in 1986. In 1987, Oracle became the largest database-management company in the world. However, in 1990 an internal audit conducted in the wake of a shareholder’s lawsuit revealed that Oracle had overstated its earnings, and the company’s stock plunged dramatically. Ellison restructured Oracle’s management, and by the end of 1992 the company had returned to financial health.

In the mid-1990s Ellison saw an opportunity to compete with Microsoft Corporation by developing a cheap alternative to the desktop personal computer (PC) called the Network Computer (NC). The NC was not as fully equipped as a standard PC and relied on computer servers for its data and software in an early version of what later became known as cloud computing. However, both the continued fall in PC prices and delays in the NC’s development meant that PCs running the Microsoft Windows operating system continued to dominate business users’ desktops. Ellison later admitted that the NC was technologically premature.

Ellison had more success with his early embrace of the Internet. Oracle developed products that were compatible with World Wide Web technologies, which helped the company to grow. In the early 2000s, Ellison started Oracle on an aggressive strategy of buying rival software companies. Dozens of acquisitions were made, including multibillion-dollar purchases of PeopleSoft (2005), Siebel (2006), BEA (2008), and Sun Microsystems (2010).

In the 2020s, Oracle shifted its strategic focus from enterprise software toward building large-scale cloud infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI). Under Ellison’s direction, the company secured more than $300 billion in multiyear contracts with major technology companies, including OpenAI, Meta Platforms (META), NVIDIA (NVDA), SoftBank, and xAI.

In 2025, Oracle disclosed plans for a $500 billion data center initiative, known as “Stargate,” intended to provide computing capacity for leading global AI developers and backed in part by investors such as President Donald Trump.

Ellison emphasized forging close partnerships with NVIDIA rather than developing competing chips, securing priority access to the company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which had become essential to training large AI models. Following these moves, Oracle’s stock price surged as much as 38% in a single day in September 2025, its largest single-day increase since 1992. Analysts described the company as riding an “AI super-cycle,” with projections that its cloud infrastructure revenue could grow 77% to $18 billion in 2025 and potentially reach $144 billion by 2029. Ellison frequently said that “AI changes everything” on earnings calls, becoming one of the most visible corporate advocates of AI in business and technology.

In 2024, Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company had collected and sold personal data from billions of consumers without sufficient disclosure or consent. The settlement, one of the largest privacy-related legal actions in Oracle’s history, followed claims that the company’s advertising and tracking technologies violated data protection and consumer privacy laws in multiple jurisdictions. Ellison wasn’t named as a defendant in the case, which was directed at the company rather than its executives.

Through his financial backing of Skydance, the production company led by his son David Ellison, Ellison expanded his influence into the media industry. In 2025, Skydance completed an $8.4 billion acquisition of Paramount Global and soon afterward began preparing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).

As part of regulatory commitments tied to the Paramount merger, CBS News created an ombudsman role to review bias complaints and scaled back some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The moves were widely seen as signaling a more conservative editorial direction at CBS News, drawing both support from executives and concern among staff, and marked a broadening of Ellison’s influence from technology into the cultural sphere.

Larry Ellison became recognized as one of the world’s richest individuals in the early 1990s. Forbes first listed him as a billionaire in 1993, and by the end of that decade he was regularly ranked among the top 10 to 20 wealthiest people worldwide. In 2001, he was ranked fourth on Forbes’s annual list, with an estimated fortune of $26 billion, and through the 2000s and 2010s he continued to place near the top of global billionaire rankings compiled by Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In September 2025, his net worth briefly rose to about $400 billion, making him for part of that day the world’s richest person, before Tesla CEO Elon Musk regained the top spot. The surge followed a steep rise in Oracle’s stock price, driven by major contracts for AI and cloud computing services.

Known for his aggressive business style and conspicuous spending, Ellison was long regarded as one of Silicon Valley’s most divisive figures. An avid yachtsman, he founded a team that won the America’s Cup in 2010, and in 2012 he purchased nearly all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. His career came to be seen as spanning two eras of modern business, from the rise of enterprise software to the global expansion of AI and digital media.