Larry Ellison now leads the company Oracle and owns more than 100 billion euros. His life did not look so successful at the beginning.
Many dream of having earned a lot of money or owning a large company at the end of their lives. For some people, life is very messy, but in the end they managed to do just that.
One of those people is Larry Ellison. Today he runs the Oracle Corporation and is himself one of the richest people in the world. MeinMMO introduces you to its history.
Ellison does not graduate from college, but learns programming
Larry Ellison was adopted by his uncle and aunt as a child. As a child, he often fell ill and also caught severe pneumonia. His then single 19-year-old mother then sent him to his relatives, who adopted him.
He grew up in a middle-class household and did not have to worry about money since his uncle worked in administration.
While he is said to have had a very loving relationship with his aunt, he was constantly at odds with his uncle. After the death of his aunt, Ellison failed his exams and dropped out of college. He then began a second degree in Chicago. But he ended that right after the first semester.
His uncle then said that he would never get anywhere. This is reported by several sources such as achievement.org or Britannica.com.
But that was not to come true. Because at the University of Chicago, Ellison had already learned the basics of computer programming. With these skills, he went to Berkeley, California and held a variety of jobs for the next 8 years. Eventually, he met his colleagues Robert Miner and Ed Oates at Ampex.
After just 3 years, Ellison is leading a million-dollar company
Together with Miner and Oates, Ellison founded the company “Software Development Labs” in 1977 with just $2,000 in seed capital. Together they developed a project for the CIA codenamed Oracle.
Oracle was based on a concept by Edgar F. Codd, who had described the concept of a Structured Query Language (SQL). No one really cared about the concept, but Ellison saw potential in it. He therefore signed a two-year contract to develop a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CIA.
In fact, the team finished development after just a year. With the new experiences and the remaining time, a commercial database management system was then developed. They also called this system Oracle.
In 1980, three years after founding her company, the company had only 8 employees, but almost broke the million mark in revenue. When IBM finally licensed Oracle for mainframes in 1981, sales were doubling each year. Eventually, Ellison renamed the company Oracle Corporation, after its best-selling product up to that point.
Where are the company and Ellison today? Today, Oracle offers a wide range of other services in addition to its database software. In 2020, Oracle Group had annual sales of $40.5 billion and more than 132,000 employees.
Ellison himself was ranked the 8th richest person in the world by Forbes Magazine in 2022 with $106 billion.
Other exciting people from the tech sector: Would you like to read more exciting stories about people from the tech sector? Then read the following article. Here we tell you about a man who was homeless for a year and a half. But today he runs a huge company:
His parents kicked him out when he was 17 – Today he runs a tech company worth 1.3 billion euros