Larry Ellison
17-Aug-1944
Andorra
Businessperson
Larry Ellison was born in the Bronx, New York, August 17, 1944, to a single mother, Florence Spellman. When he was nine months old, Ellison contracted pneumonia, and her mother sent her to Chicago to be raised by her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted the baby.
After high school, Ellison enrolled at the University of Illinois, Champaign (1962), where he was named a student of that year. In his second year, her adoptive mother died, and Ellison dropped out of college. The following fall, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, but ended up alone after the end of the year.
Ellison then packed his bags in Berkeley, California, for a pittance, and the next decade left her job at places such as Wells Fargo and Amdahl Corporation. During his college career, Ellison had acquired basic computer skills, and eventually he was able to put them to use as a programmer at Amdahl, where he worked on the IBM's first-ever compatible program.
In 1977, Ellison and two Amdahl colleagues formed Software Development Labs and soon entered into an agreement to develop a data management system - which they called Oracle - for the CIA. The company had less than 10 employees and a turnover of less than $ 1 million a year, but in 1981, IBM signed up to use Oracle, and the company's sales doubled every year for the next seven years. Ellison soon renamed the company after its best-selling product.
