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
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.
When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, Convert this to Android format.
If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it--a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all--you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.
Right now, 70 percent of the people don't have computers. And where they're needed most, people don't have them. We think this will enable anyone to own a computer. We're aiming at everybody who uses a computer as an information access device. The original idea was to build one cheaply enough to put one on every desk.
I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.
I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.
It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.
We have been doing things that are contrary; the things that people tell us won't work from the beginning. In fact, the only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.
You have to take a broader view and realize this is an industry like any other - telecoms, Railroads; they went through consolidation. Why shouldn't the computer industry be any different? This shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody but it seemed to be, and a lot of people thought I was nuts when I said these things. And that's why they are alone as a consolidator.
We will still be enormously profitable and by far the most profitable enterprise software company.
There will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years.
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.
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.
So what makes me happy? I was really happy to build this house. That's it; building things. The trouble with software is that it's very hard to show your aunt in Florida what you've done.