Larry Ellison

Lawrence Joseph Larry Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American magnate, co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, specializing in administrative software. As of March 2019, he was listed by Forbes magazine as the third-richest person in the United States and seventh-richest person in the world, with a fortune of $62.5 billion, up from $58.5 billion in 2018 and as of October 68 billion dollars.

During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was to build a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by an article by Edgar F. Codd about linked database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". In 1977, he founded the Software Development Laboratories SDL with two associates and an investment of $2,000. He personally contributed $1,200.

In 1979, the company changed its name to Relational Software Inc., then again to Oracle after its key product, Oracle Database. He had heard of the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theory, and he wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but this was not possible because IBM refused to share the System R code. Oracle's last release top is Oracle 2; no Oracle 1.

Net worth: $93B

Country: United States

Source: Software