Millionaire Focus on Larry Ellison

Welcome to tonight's Millionaire Focus. Tonight we are going to briefly look at Larry Ellison and perhaps glean some gems on how he became Forbes sixth richest person in the world. As of 2010 Larry Ellison has a personal wealth of about $27 billion.

For those of you who may not have heard of Larry Ellison, he is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation. Oracle is a major enterprise software company that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products, in particular, database management systems. Larry Ellison came from humble beginnings, he was born in New York City, to a 19-year old unwed Jewish mother. He was given (at his mother's request) to his aunt and uncle in Chicago to raise and was adopted by them when he was 9 months old. He grew up in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, spent a summer in Northern California, then attended the University of Chicago for one term which is where he first encountered computer designing.

He became a computer programmer for Ampex Corporation where his primary project was crafting a large-scale database for the CIA. This database was code-named "Oracle". He then put up $2,000 of his own money to start Software Development Laboratories in 1977, in partnership with Robert Miner, his boss from Ampex. The new company was renamed Relational Software Inc in 1979. It was here that he prepared to release Oracle Version 2, a commercial database system. In an interesting note, he never released a Version 1 because Larry Ellison observed that people did not typically purchase Version 1 of any new software because Version 1's were typcially buggy. So, as a marketing tactic, his first release of Oracle was Version 2, which by the way, was as buggy as any Version 1 would be. This Version 2 sold well and in 1983 the company was again renamed, this time after it's flagship product, Oracle. Oracle Corporation went public in 1986, was on the verge of bankruptcy by 1990 but has since rebounded and has been profitable ever since.

Larry Ellison plays as hard as he works. He co-owns the sixth largest yacht in the world, named Rising Sun. He is also a financier of BMW Oracle Racing which in the 2007 America's Cup was the Challenger of Record. They were eliminated from the 2007 Louis Vuitton Cup challenger selection series in the semi-finals. On February 14, 2010, Ellison's yacht, (Ellison was a crew member for this race) USA 17, won the second race of the 33rd America's Cup. Ellison and his BMW Oracle team became the first challengers to win a "deed of gift" match. The Cup returned to American shores for the first time since 1995.

Larry Ellison is also a licensed pilot and has owned several aircraft, including fighter jets. He owns many exotic cars and has styled his home in Woodside, California, after feudal Japanese architecture, complete with a man-made 2.3 acre lake. In 2004 and 2005, Larry Ellison purchased more than 12 properties in Malibu, California. His entertainment system cost $1 million and includes a rock concert-sized video projector at one end of a drained swimming pool.

As a balance, Larry Ellison has also made considerable charitable donations to various organizations. In 2004 Forbes noted that Ellison had donated $151,092,103 in the preceeding year, or about 1% of his estimated personal wealth. In August of this year, it has been reported that Larry Ellison is one of the 40 billionaires who has signed "The Giving Pledge". Ellison wrote: "Many years ago, I put virtually all of my assets into a trust with the intent of giving away at least 95% of my wealth to charitable causes. I have already given hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research and education, and I will give billions more over time. Until now, I have done this giving quietly - because I have long believed that charitable giving is a personal and private matter."

Hopefully, as we all work towards our own personal Millionaire and Billionaire status, we too will remember to be generous with our charitable contributions. We all have the ability to come from humble beginnings and work to become financially free. Hopefully there were some tidbits of information from Larry Ellison's examples that you will be able to use in your business ventures.

If you are searching for a business opportunity to get involved in, please feel free to visit our website for some second income ideas. We would be more than willing to answer your questions regarding starting a home-based business or how to begin to build a second income.

Until tomorrow...