Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison was born August 17, 1944 in a Chicago's South Shore middle-class Jewish neighborhood.

His adoptive parents were Jewish, he remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, a Russian Jew from the Crimea.

Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year and at 20 years of age, he moved to northern California permanently.

There he worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle".

In 1977 he founded his company, Oracle, putting up a mere $2000 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL), later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. The company is specialized in developing and marketing enterprise software products.

In April 2009, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems after a tug of war with IBM and Cisco.

Forbes listed Ellison's 2005 net worth as $18.4 billion, making him one of the richest people in America, and the ninth richest man in the world.

He has received numerous honors and awards, including Entrepreneur of the Year from the Harvard School of Business. Mr.Ellison sits on the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Ellison also owns large stakes in both Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Ellison has been married four times: to Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974,to Nancy Wheeler Jenkins between 1977 and 1978 and from 1983 to 1986, he was married to Barbara Boothe.

On 18 December 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. His friend Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc's CEO, was the official wedding photographer.

He has 2 children.

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