Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison
Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellisonis an American businessman who is co-founder of Oracle Corporation and was CEO from its founding until September 2014. He currently serves as executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle. In 2014, he was listed by Forbes magazine as the third-wealthiest person in America and as the fifth-wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune of US$56.2 billion...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth17 August 1944
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I know some people are offended by the fact that I'm spending a lot of money trying to win the America's Cup. I could have given all that money to charity.
There will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years.
Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.
I'd prefer people read about Churchill and how he wasn't overwhelmed by Nazi Germany. Amazing; that the morale of a country rested on one person's shoulders. Extraordinary people carried that country through its darkest hours; truly inspirational. I suppose that's my theme. Whether it's a biography or a movie; whether it's fictional or true, I'm inspired by people doing great things.
I think about the business all the time. Well I shouldn't say all the time. I don't think about it when I am wakeboarding. But even when I am on vacation, or on my boat; I am on email everyday. I am always prowling around the internet looking at what our competitors are doing.
You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.
... Don't mistake any of this for altruism...Fear and greed just doesn't work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better.
If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.
Being first is more important to me [than earning money]. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it's just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don't need more money.
You have to act and act now.
It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."
I'm addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.
What can a sales person say to somebody to get them to buy a product that they already use every day if they don't like it? Nothing.
There's a wonderful saying that's dead wrong. 'Why did you climb the mountain?' 'I climbed the mountain because it was there.' That's utter nonsense...You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.