Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman. He co-founded the software company Oracle Corporation, and was its CEO from 1977 to 2014. He now serves as its CTO and executive chairman. According to Forbes, as of early 2026, Ellison's estimated net worth is $201–203 billion, making him the world's sixth-richest person.
On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world after an increase in Oracle stock price, with an estimated net worth of $393 billion. He is also known for various other investments, such as his ownership of 98% of the land on Lānaʻi, the sixth-largest of the Hawaiian Islands, his stake in the automotive and clean energy company Tesla, Inc. worth over $19 billion, and his controlling stake in the mass media conglomerate Paramount Skydance, which is managed by his son David Ellison.
Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in New York City. His mother, Florence Spellman, is Jewish. His biological father was an Italian-American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, Spellman gave Ellison to Spellman's aunt and uncle for adoption. Ellison did not meet Spellman again until he was 48.
Ellison moved with his adoptive parents to Chicago's South Shore, a middle-class neighborhood with a significant Jewish population. He remembers his adoptive mother, Lillian Spellman Ellison, as warm and loving. He found his adoptive father, Louis Ellison, to be austere, unsupportive, and often distant. A government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression, Louis had chosen his last name to honor Ellis Island, his point of entry into the United States.
Ellison was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive parents, who attended synagogue regularly, but he remained a religious skeptic. At age 13, Ellison refused to have a bar mitzvah celebration. Ellison said: "While I think I am religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not dogmas I subscribe to. I don't believe that they are real. They're interesting stories. They're interesting mythology, and I certainly respect people who believe these are literally true, but I don't. I see no evidence for this stuff." Ellison says that his fondness for Israel is not connected to religious sentiments but rather due to Israelis' innovative spirit in the technology sector.
Ellison attended South Shore High School in Chicago, was admitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and enrolled as a pre-med student. At the university, he was named science student of the year. He withdrew without taking final exams after his sophomore year because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending the summer of 1966 in California, he then attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he studied physics and mathematics and also first encountered computer design. He then moved to Berkeley, California, and began his career as a computer programmer for several different companies.
During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His first project included a database for the CIA, code-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, Ellison, Ed Oates and Bruce Scott joined Software Development Laboratories (SDL) several months after it was founded by Ellison's supervisor at Ampex, Bob Miner. They invested $2,000 (equivalent to $10,626 in 2025), of which $1,200 (equivalent to $6,376 in 2025) was Ellison's. Although he had strong technical skills—Ellison was not officially categorized as a developer until about 1984—the founders decided that as the others were stronger technically, he would run sales.
In 1979, the company renamed itself Relational Software, Inc. (RSI). Ellison had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to achieve compatibility with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's error codes. The initial release of the Oracle Database in 1979 was called Oracle version 2; there was no Oracle version 1. In 1983, the company officially became Oracle Systems Corporation (named after its flagship product). In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% of its workforce (about 400 people) because it was losing money. This crisis, which almost resulted in the company's bankruptcy, came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This became a problem when those future sales failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and had to settle class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison later said that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake".
Although IBM dominated the mainframe relational database market with its DB2 and SQL/DS database products, it delayed entering the market for a relational database on Unix and Windows operating systems. This left the door open for Sybase, Oracle, Ingres, Informix, and eventually Microsoft to dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers. Around this time, Oracle fell behind Sybase. From 1990 to 1993, Sybase was the fastest-growing database company and the database industry's darling vendor. In 1993, Sybase sold the rights to its database software running under the Windows operating system to Microsoft Corporation, which now markets it under the name "SQL Server". Sybase soon fell victim to merger mania; its 1996 merger with Powersoft resulted in a loss of focus on its core database technology.
In 1990, Ellison was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Harvard University.
In 1994, Informix overtook Sybase and became Oracle's most important rival. The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison was front-page Silicon Valley news for three years. In April 1997, Informix announced a major revenue shortfall and earnings restatements. White eventually landed in jail. Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs returned to the company. Ellison resigned from that position in 2002.
With the defeat of Informix and Sybase, Oracle enjoyed industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in the late 1990s and IBM's acquisition of Informix Software in 2001 to complement its DB2 database. By 2013 Oracle's main competition for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems came from IBM's DB2 and from Microsoft SQL Server. IBM's DB2 still dominated the mainframe database market.
In 2005, Ellison agreed to settle a four-year-old insider-trading lawsuit by offering to pay $100 million (equivalent to $160,000,000 in 2025) to charity in Oracle's name.
In 2005, Oracle Corporation paid Ellison a $975,000 salary (equivalent to $1,600,000 in 2025), a $6,500,000 bonus (equivalent to $11,000,000 in 2025), and other compensation of $955,100 (equivalent to $1,600,000 in 2025). In 2007, Ellison earned a total compensation of $61,180,524 (equivalent to $95,000,000 in 2025), which included a base salary of $1,000,000 (equivalent to $1,600,000 in 2025), a cash bonus of $8,369,000 (equivalent to $13,000,000 in 2025), and options granted of $50,087,100 (equivalent to $77,800,000 in 2025). In 2008, he earned a total compensation of $84,598,700 (equivalent to $127,000,000 in 2025), which included a base salary of $1,000,000 (equivalent to $1,500,000 in 2025), a cash bonus of $10,779,000 (equivalent to $16,000,000 in 2025), no stock grants, and options granted of $71,372,700 (equivalent to $110,000,000 in 2025). In the year ending May 31, 2009, he made $56.8 million (equivalent to $85,000,000 in 2025).
In 2006, Forbes ranked him as the richest Californian. In April 2009, after a tug-of-war with IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun Microsystems.