The fortune of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison

How rich is Larry Ellison?

Larry Ellison heads a number of rankings. Because with one Assets of 107.66 billion euros he is clearly one of the richest people in the world. He is also the fourth richest man (after Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) in the tech sector and the seventh richest billionaire in the world, including fifth in the United States. The self-made billionaire had never even graduated from Chicago University. Nevertheless, Larry Ellison made it to the top with an IT company Oracle, whose CTO (shares around 28%) he continues to be. The native New Yorker, who has two children and has been divorced four times, now lives in Woodside, California. He also sits on the board of directors of Tesla and holds around 1.75 in the auto maker of his friend Elon Musk. He is said to have bought Tesla shares worth over a billion dollars.

Surprising Facts About Larry Ellison

Although Larry Ellison is known for an extravagant lifestyle, very few people know that he was born to an unmarried mother in New York City and that he developed severe pneumonia at the age of 9 months. As a result, his birth mother gave little Larry up for adoption and he was adopted by his great aunt and uncle. Today’s billionaire only saw his birth mother again when he was a good 24 years old. Compared to Bill Gates, Larry Ellison had a harder time in his early childhood and had no access to computers. It was only his second attempt to get a university degree that allowed the billionaire to really immerse himself in the world of computers. However, Larry never received a degree from the University of Chicago or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The creation of Oracle

The smart entrepreneur founded his first company in 1977. At that time, he invested only 1,200 US dollars to set up Software Development Laboratories. The young company was able to celebrate its first successes with a project in which the company built up a database for the CIA over a period of two years. In 1982 the company was renamed and became known as Oracle Systems Corporation. In the 1990s it was like that today successful billionaire on the verge of collapseas Oracle nearly went bankrupt. But obviously he could still make the jump. After all, Ellison is known not only for his courage as an entrepreneur, but also as an extreme athlete. While surfing as well as mountain biking, one of the richest people in the world has suffered numerous serious injuries. When he broke his elbow several times in a bicycle accident at extremely high speeds, this led Larry Ellison to further expand his social commitment.

Larry Ellison: bon vivant with expensive luxury yachts

An outpatient clinic named after him was opened in 1998 and he donated a further US $ 5 million to a research center, which primarily deals with the topic of bone and muscle health. But spectacular accidents aren’t the only things the billionaire made headlines with. Namely, he is also responsible for one of the most expensive real estate deals in US history. In 2004, he bought five adjacent properties on Carbon Beach in Malibu, California for a whopping $ 65 million. In 2006, Forbes announced that Ellison had become California’s richest man. The fact that the entrepreneur voluntarily cut his annual salary to just $ 1 in 2009 was equally exceptional. Larry Ellison is far from being a poor man, as he is one of the largest shareholders at Oracle and also receives huge bonuses. Larry Ellison’s life was always exciting.

The list of extraordinary facts about Larry Ellison’s life is even longer. After all, the billionaire wasn’t just the proud one in the past Owner of the largest yacht in the worldbut he also owns a pilot’s license as well two military jets. In addition, Ellison has married and divorced four times, with only two children emerging from his numerous marriages. However, his second ex-wife may have made the biggest mistake of her life. Because she waived her stake in Oracle for just $ 500. If she hadn’t, the Ellison ex would probably be a billionaire herself today.

Larry is also a huge tennis fan and already did that in 2009 ATP 1000 tournament Indian Wells and bought the entire Indian Wells Tennis Garden in California.

Billions for charity

When the billionaire married his fourth wife, the writer Melanie Craft, none other than Steve Jobs himself was the wedding photographer. In addition, the island of Lanai, which belongs to Hawaii, is 98 percent owned by the billionaire who signed the “Giving Pledge” along with many other billionaires. So in the course of his life, Ellison plans to donate at least half of his fortune to charity. Larry Ellison is in very good company with Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet.

Incidentally, the entrepreneur has not been active as CEO of Oracle since 2014. But he already knows how to pass the free time. Because he owns properties worth several hundred million around the world. If the stress in California becomes too much for him, the billionaire can, for example, retreat to his gardens in Kyoto or his property in Rhode Island. But he has not yet succeeded in one thing: both attempts to buy an NBA team have failed miserably. Neither the Golden Gate Warriors nor the New Orleans Hornets approved the sale. But at least the billionaire owns the Oracle Stadium named after his company. That’s something.

Image sources:
s_bukley + drserg / Bigstock.com
Musashi Yacht: Roman Boed / Flickr [CC-BY 2.0]