Larry Ellison

Ellison has been married six times. He was married to Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974, Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978, Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986, Melanie Craft from 2003 to 2010, and Nikita Kahn from 2015 until their divorce was finalized in 2020. He has been married to Jolin (Keren) Zhu since 2023.

Ellison has six children, including David Ellison and Megan Ellison, his children with Barbara Boothe. David became a film producer and the head of Skydance Media, while Megan became a film producer associated with Annapurna Pictures. Ellison and Zhu have four children.

Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish household in Chicago after being adopted by his aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison. His biological mother, Florence Spellman, was Jewish. He has described himself as a religious skeptic and declined a bar mitzvah at age 13.

Ellison moved to California after brief periods at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chicago. He worked as a computer programmer, including at Amdahl Corporation, where he helped build an IBM-compatible mainframe system. At Ampex Corporation, he worked on a database project for the Central Intelligence Agency that was code-named Oracle.

In 1977, Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The company developed a commercial relational database after Ellison encountered Edgar F. Codd's work on relational data systems. Its CIA contract helped the founders develop the technology, and the first commercial release, Oracle 2, appeared in 1979. The company later became Relational Software, Inc., and then Oracle Systems Corporation, named after its flagship product.

Oracle's sales grew rapidly after IBM adopted Oracle for its mainframe systems in 1981. The company went public in 1986 and expanded its database products for Unix and Windows. Oracle nearly collapsed in 1990 after accounting irregularities led to overstated sales and a major management crisis. Ellison replaced much of the senior management team and shifted his focus toward product development. The release of Oracle 7 in 1992 helped restore the company's position as a database industry leader.

During the 2000s, Ellison pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy that expanded Oracle beyond its original database business. Major purchases included PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, Hyperion Solutions, and Sun Microsystems. The Sun acquisition gave Oracle control of the MySQL open-source database. Ellison stepped down as CEO in 2014, appointing Mark Hurd and Safra Catz as CEOs, but continued as executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Ellison promoted Oracle's expansion into internet-based business applications and later into cloud computing. Oracle acquired NetSuite in 2016, and the company increasingly positioned its infrastructure as a platform for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. Ellison also joined Tesla's board of directors in 2018 and left the board in 2022.

In January 2025, Ellison appeared with Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son at the White House to announce the Stargate Project, an artificial intelligence infrastructure initiative involving Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank. He was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2026.

Ellison also expanded into the media industry through his son David Ellison's Skydance Media. Skydance completed its combination with Paramount Global in 2025, bringing Paramount, CBS, and other media properties under the new Paramount Skydance organization. David Ellison became its chief executive and chairman. Ellison additionally co-founded Project Ronin with David Agus and Dave Hodgson, a software company focused on analyzing electronic medical-record data for cancer care, which closed in 2024.

Ellison is an avid yachtsman and founded BMW Oracle Racing to compete in the America's Cup. In 2010, he joined the crew when the team defeated Alinghi in the competition's deciding race, returning the America's Cup to the United States for the first time in 15 years. Oracle Team USA defended the title in 2013 by defeating Emirates Team New Zealand in a comeback from an 8-1 deficit.

In 2019, Ellison and Russell Coutts launched SailGP, an international racing series using high-speed F50 foiling catamarans. He has also owned large yachts, raced smaller vessels, and practiced aerobatics in private and military aircraft.

Ellison owns most of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi and moved there from California in 2020. He has supported medical research and education, including the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine at the University of Southern California and the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford. His other public projects have included funding for musculoskeletal research at the University of California, Davis.