Larry Ellison
Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is the founder and CEO of the major database software firm Oracle Corporation.
Ellison was born out of wedlock to a 19-year-old girl, and was raised by her aunt. He had an early aptitude for mathematics, and worked as a young man for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle".
Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems named A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up $2000 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories. In 1979 the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later to be renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM stopped this by keeping the error codes for their DBMS secret. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2, even though there was no Oracle 1. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.
Ellison is also the leader and principal financier of Oracle-BMW Racing, who competed to be challenger for the America's Cup in 1999 and 2003 on behalf of the Golden Gate Yacht Club of San Francisco.
Ellison is reported to be one of the richest people in America by Forbes. He had an estate styled like a Medieval Japanese village built in Woodside, California. He also owns a modernistic house in San Francisco's exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood on Broadway Street.
At the Woodside estate, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, on 18 December 2003. At the wedding, his best friend, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, was the official photographer. Craft was Ellison's fourth wife. He has a son and a daughter by previous wives.
Ellison has had several run-ins with San Jose Mineta International Airport concerning the noise from his private jet. The city of San Jose has a limitation on late night takeoffs and landings on planes weighing more than 75,000 pounds, and Ellison received several citations. In 2001, he was granted a personal waiver on the law.
