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Overview
Larry Ellison started the high-flying tech company Oracle with $1,200 in 1977 and turned it into a billion-dollar Silicon Valley giant. If Bill Gates is the tech world's nerd king, Ellison is its Warren Beatty: racing yachts, buying jets, and romancing beautiful women. His rise to fame and fortune is a tale of entrepreneurial brilliance, ruthless tactics, and a constant stream of half-truths and outright fabrications for which the man and his company are notorious.
Investigative reporter Mike Wilson, with access to Ellison himself and more than 125 of his friends, enemies, and former Oracle employees, has created an eye-opening, utterly fascinating portrayal of a Silicon Valley success story ... filled with the stuff that dreams and cultural icons are made of.
Synopsis
An entertaining and provocative portrait of Bill Gates's chief rival in Silicon Valley -- a $6 billion man with a $30 billion company.
Publishers Weekly
Silicon Valley seems to hold an endless fascination for business readers, and there are few more intriguing characters than Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., the huge software firm, and reputedly the fifth-richest man in the U.S. Be it the homes he is building, the women the thrice-divorced Ellison is dating or the (frequently none too favorable) comments he makes about his competitors, the self-made billionaire generates a lot of press. In this biography, Wilson, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, does a solid job of punching holes in the myths that surround Ellison. It turns out that his subject didn't grow up on the streets of Chicago, as he has led some to believe, nor does he have a college degree, let alone the graduate degrees attributed to him. As for the rest of Wilson's take on Ellison, who agreed to be interviewed for the book, the title tells close to all. The author paints a slightly broader picture of his subject, but this "update" of the Citizen Kane legend makes it clear no one is going to accuse Ellison of being self-effacing. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Silicon Valley seems to hold an endless fascination for business readers, and there are few more intriguing characters than Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., the huge software firm, and reputedly the fifth-richest man in the U.S. Be it the homes he is building, the women the thrice-divorced Ellison is dating or the (frequently none too favorable) comments he makes about his competitors, the self-made billionaire generates a lot of press. In this biography, Wilson, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, does a solid job of punching holes in the myths that surround Ellison. It turns out that his subject didn't grow up on the streets of Chicago, as he has led some to believe, nor does he have a college degree, let alone the graduate degrees attributed to him. As for the rest of Wilson's take on Ellison, who agreed to be interviewed for the book, the title tells close to all. The author paints a slightly broader picture of his subject, but this "update" of the Citizen Kane legend makes it clear no one is going to accuse Ellison of being self-effacing. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)Booknews
Draws on interviews with Ellison's friends and enemies, as well as Ellison himself, to create a portrait of the self-made billionaire who founded Oracle, the second largest software company in the world, with a $1,200 investment. Details growth of the company and financial mismanagement that came close to driving the company into bankruptcy, and tells of Ellison's exploits in sports and romance. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Kirkus Reviews
An authorized biography of Oracle's founder and brash billionaire leader.Ellison, the adopted son of a Jewish couple from Chicago, seems to specialize in reinventing himself. By all accounts, he grew up on middle-class South Shore Drive, but he has told reporters that he lived in the South Side ghetto. He was an uninspired student who never received a college degree but would maintain something of an obsession with the University of Chicago and imply he had an advanced degree in physics. Ellison is also an indifferent student of language but has arranged his home with all the trappings of a Japanese lord, and a few boats and helicopters to boot. These grand inconsistencies—delightful to some, horribly irritating to others, including many former employees—go a long way to explaining Ellison's unbelievable success at marketing his Oracle database software, used by thousands of companies. One employee, a devout Mormon named Rick Bennett, even considered his ubiquitous software akin to "an instrument of God" and believed Ellison pivotal to modern-day Mormonism. Wilson, an investigative reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, wisely focuses much of the attention on Ellison's one-sided feud with Bill Gates (who views Ellison as something of a gadfly but doesn't mention his name at all in his book, The Road Ahead) and documents his obsession nicely. He also does a fair job of explaining Ellison's vision for the NC, an inexpensive computer that provides quick access to the Internet and stores all of its software on a network server, rather than on a hard drive. While some in the computer business see the NC as the future computer for schools, many others see it as a $500 empty box and a poor attempt to topple Microsoft.
While the title is the funniest line of the book, this is an engaging, humanizing look at a Silicon Valley megalomaniac.