10 Facts About Larry Ellison - Dropout to Billionaire
#7 richest person in the country.
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According to Forbes Magazine, two billionaires on the Forbes 400 consider Hawaii home. Today, I will talk about the wealthiest person in Hawaii, Larry Ellison. He has a net worth of $117.3 billion, making him the 7th richest person in the country.
Who is Larry Ellison?
Larry (Lawrence) Ellison is an American business executive and investor who co-founded Oracle Corporation. He also owns the 43rd largest island in the United States, Lanai in the Hawaiian Islands.
Larry Ellison was born in New York on August 17, 1944, to a 19 years unwed Jewish mother, Florence Spellman. His father was an Italian-American who served in United States Army Air Corps as a pilot.
At nine months, he contracted pneumonia, and his mother couldn’t take care of him, so she sent him to live with her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted him. He didn’t see his birth mother again until he was 48.
His adoptive father had a real estate business, but he lost it during the Great Depression and became a public employee. Larry Ellison became a rebellious young man and often clashed with adoptive parents.
He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a premed student, but he dropped out in his second year because of the death of his adoptive mother. He traveled for one year before attending the University of Chicago, but he dropped out again and moved to California.
According to Business Insider, he worked at different companies and learned computer programing. Then, in 1977, he partnered with Bob Miner and Ed Oates and founded a Software Development Laboratories.
In 1983, the company officially became Oracle Systems Corporation. In 1986, Oracle became a public company and reported revenue of $55 million. He retired from being the company CEO in 2014, and since then, he has served in different capacities.
According to Bloomberg, Oracle is the largest database company with more than $40 billion in the year to May 31, 2021. In 2018, Ellison joined the Tesla board of directors after buying 3 million Tesla shares.
