Lawrence J. Ellison

Age: 63

WHAT HE DOES
Serves as C.E.O. of Oracle, the company he founded in 1977.

WHAT HE’S KNOWN FOR
Silicon Valley shopping sprees. With the ambition of Napoléon Bonaparte and the appetite of Pac-Man, Ellison has been buying up tech competitors at an astonishing rate. And he does so with a sense of divine entitlement. As the joke goes, “What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”

Ellison hates to lose, and he hates coming in second. So it really irked him, in 1986, when Microsoft’s initial public offering overshadowed Oracle’s, held just one day earlier. Ever since, Ellison has made Bill Gates his No. 1 nemesis, even sending private investigators to sift through the trash of two Microsoft allies in search of anything incriminating during the P.C. software giant’s 2000 antitrust trial (when he was caught, Ellison claimed that the amateur espionage was Oracle’s “civic duty”).

Runner-up to Gates in 2000 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, Ellison snorted that “Forbes will spot Bill as many billions as he needs.” Ellison’s ranking has since dropped, but his fortune’s still a big one—upward of $20 billion—and Ellison has put it to use in creating a new form of programmer chic. From his clothes to his resculpted nose, he’s always seemed more Beverly Hills than Silicon Valley. No devotee of the 90-hour workweek, he makes plenty of time for racing his yachts, flying his jets, and entertaining at his mansions, which are scattered across California. He spurns the tech world’s signature casual dress code in favor of Armani. He lives in Woodside, California, in a 23-acre compound modeled after a Japanese village, with his fourth wife, Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, and a son and daughter from a previous marriage, both of whom are adults.
 
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Ellison, who never met his biological father, has been widely quoted recalling his adoptive father’s constant (and profoundly off the mark) admonition: “You’ll never amount to anything.” Ellison dropped out of the University of Chicago and moved west to find work in the dawning technology industry, a few years before the onset of the gold rush in Silicon Valley. In 1977, he started a software-consulting development firm with fellow programmers Bob Miner and Ed Oates that became the genesis of Oracle.

WHAT HE DOES
Ellison leads Oracle like something of a Corleone: menacing to outsiders but generous to those in the family, who are expected to give unwavering loyalty. He has made millionaires out of his best-performing minions and has continued to reward them even after they strike out on their own, including the former employees who founded the startups NetSuite and Salesforce.com (although Ellison later created a competitor). But Ellison has no love for underlings who get in his way: When former Oracle president Ray Lane advised him to change his leadership style, Ellison stripped him of his authority, and Lane left the company in July of 2000.

WHERE HE’S GOING
Not into retirement, that’s for sure. To calm shareholders, some of whom have long feared that Oracle is too much of a one-man show, Ellison gave up his chairman title to C.F.O. Jeff Henley in 2004. More recently, he’s further placated investors by playing up co-president and C.F.O. Safra Catz’s importance to the company. But Oracle execs won’t go so far as to name an heir to Ellison. They know that their boss—who’s admitted to a fear of aging and dying—doesn’t want to talk about abdicating the throne. And, since they want to keep their jobs, neither do they. —Megan Angelo