Founder of Oracle Corp., NetSuite, Inc., Tako Ventures LLC and Oracle Systems Corp., Lawrence Joseph Ellison is an entrepreneur who presently is Executive Chairman & Chief Technology Officer at Oracle Corp. Mr. Ellison is also on the board of Knowledge Universe, Inc., Tesla, Inc. and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, Inc.

Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman, best known as the co-founder and chairman of Oracle Corporation, an enterprise software company. In 2014, Forbes listed him as the third-wealthiest man in America and as the fifth-wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune of $52 billion. His father was an Italian American United States Air Force pilot. After Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption.

Ellison graduated from Eugene Field Elementary School in Park Ridge, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, in January 1958 and attended Roger C. Sullivan High School at least through the fall of 1959 before moving to Chicago's South Shore, a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Ellison remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, who adopted the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the United States, Ellis Island. Louis Ellison was a government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression. Ellison says that he has a love affair with Israel that is not connected to religious sentiments, but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis, particularly in the technology sector.

He left the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign after his second year, after not taking his final exams, because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending a summer in northern California, Ellison attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer design. In 1966, aged 22, he moved to northern California.

Career
[Ellison in Oracle OpenWorld 2010.JPG|thumb|Larry Ellison lecturing at the Oracle OpenWorld], San Francisco 2010

During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.

Source @ Wikipedia