Last week, my son asked me if I knew of Larry Ellison. At first, I felt that I did not, until he told me that he was the president of the company Oracle. I had heard of that computer industry giant. Then, he told me that Ellison had just become the world’s richest man. I was intrigued that he had passed the likes of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Who was this man?

A fairly wealthy man once told me that if someone gives you the first million, the second million is a lot easier to amass. But Ellison turned out to be an exception to that rule. Ellison, now 81 years old, started as the son of an unwed mother in the poorer section of New York. His mother was Jewish and was somewhat shunned for the birth. His father was a pilot in the Army Air Corps and never appeared again in Ellison’s life.

In 1953, Ellison contracted pneumonia, and his mother placed the child with her aunt and uncle, who then adopted Larry. His new parents moved to Chicago, having come from Europe after World War II. His new father had picked a new last name in honor of his point of entry into this country through Ellis Island. Larry’s last name was similarly changed when he was adopted.

Although Larry was raised in the Jewish faith and attended synagogue regularly, he remained a religious skeptic, and at the age of 13, he refused to have a bar mitzvah. Even at that tender age, he was to follow his own thoughts. He later said that his refusal was not based on being religious or not, but that he felt the dogmas of Judaism were literally not true.

Education was next, but in a rather untypical manner. He started at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in pre-med and was named science student of the year. He withdrew from the school late in his sophomore year without finishing his finals, as his adoptive mother had passed away. After spending some time that summer in California, a new area of business appeared to him. That fall, he was back home and enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he studied math and physics. But there was this continuing interest in a new subject: the computer.

After a year in Chicago, he moved to Berkeley, California, and his new life began with short stays with various companies in the computer industry, including a while at Tesla. One of his early projects was for the CIA with a database code-named Oracle. Over the next 15 years, Ellison founded his own company with two partners in the software industry. He named it Oracle.

Ellison had quickly learned about databases and that IBM was the leader in that portion of the industry. He wanted his company to achieve compatibility with IBM, but IBM refused to share a vital program called System R’s error code. IBM had not pursued other areas of computer databases, and Oracle went on with its own plan.

It was here that Ellison got the label of a fearsome opponent. In 1994, a company called Informix took over a computer model that Ellison had founded but sold at the will of his two partners. Oracle formed a new database that rivaled their old plan, and the fight was on. Phil White, the CEO of Informix, fought openly with Ellison in court and in the business world. The two were a common topic on the front page of the Silicon Valley News. Eventually, Informix went broke, and White went to jail. The new reputation of Ellison was born.

By 2005, Oracle paid Ellison a salary of $975,000 plus a bonus of $6.5 million. And the bonuses kept coming, with him making $84 million in 2008. This was followed by multimillion-dollar wages and bonuses year after year. Now, Oracle was acquiring other computer companies, and the bonuses to Ellison went in part with stock options.

Then, Oracle purchased competitor Sun Microsystems, a company with a brand-new type of open-source database known as MySQL. Ellison still was one of the most fearsome corporate fighters, as he made demands of rival companies, leading to lawsuits, which most often led to financial gains for Oracle.

The purchases went on, and by 2017, Forbes had Ellison as the fourth richest person in the tech industry. By 2020, he was the seventh-wealthiest person in the world. He now owned 42.9% of Oracle and had acquired almost 2% of Tesla, along with many other Silicon Valley industries.

Last week, the shares of Oracle rose 40%, and this unbelievable increase gave Ellison an extra billion or more, making him the wealthiest man in the world with over $300 billion in net assets, passing Buffett, Gates and Musk.

While this feisty man fought multiple battles in the computer and commerce industry, he found time to be beneficial to the world as well. In 2007, Forbes listed his charitable donation at over $151 million for the year. But then again, this amounted to less than 1% of his personal wealth. He also has given $10 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, $200 million to the University of Southern California to establish a cancer research center, and $500,000 to a community center in Israel to help fortify it against rocket attacks. One of the latest was to give $52 million to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change.

I guess one doesn’t have to be given the first million in all cases.

· Dennis Marek can be contacted at llamalaw23@gmail.com.