How Larry Ellison Turned $1,200 Into A $150 Billion Empire

How Oracle’s Larry Ellison turned $1,200 into a $150 billion empire.

- Mike Wilson

“This is all kind of surreal,” Larry Ellison once told me over lunch. The man has a $48 billion fortune, and is the owner of the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament, an America’s Cup–winning sailing team, the 288-foot superyacht, Musashi, an Italian Marchetti jet, a sprawling Japanese-style estate, a large swathe of Malibu beachfront property, the Hawaiian island of Lanai, and a Hawaiian airline. “I don’t even believe it now. Not only did I not believe it when I was 14, but when I look around, I say this must be something out of a dream.”

But it’s not: it’s the product of hard work, thinking in a way nobody else dared to, and the audacity to try to change the world. Ellison did just that: he changed everything deeply and forever.

And he did it against the odds.

It is safe to say that nobody expected great things from Lawrence Joseph Ellison. Born in New York City to a 19-year-old unwed mother and a father he doesn’t talk about, Ellison was shunted off to the Chicago home of his aunt, Lillian Ellison, and her second husband, Louis. Ellison remembers Louis as a dour conformist, a complete mismatch for his free-spirited son. Once, in a basketball game, Larry accidentally scored a goal for the wrong team, and his adoptive father never let him live it down. For years, Ellison believed the negativity: he was an average student in the South Shore High class of ’62, and two years into the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he quit.

In 1966, Ellison was searching for a new life and cruised into Berkeley in an aqua-blue Ford Thunderbird. He found work at an employment agency—his first job was to help people find employment—and got married. Over the next few years, he worked for IBM, hanging tapes and backing up data.