Love him or hate him, it doesn't really matter, you HAVE to respect him! Larry Ellison is the enigmatic CEO of Oracle-PeopleSoft who has continued to make headlines in silicon valley with his controversial management style and predictions about high tech.

So just who is this billionaire whose name strikes terror in the hearts of men?

You can read some of his interviews here

Also, the following article gives us some insights.

http://www.technologymarketing.com/

November 01, 2003

The Trouble With Larry
By Karen Southwick

It's not possible to understand Oracle Corporation without understanding Larry Ellison. No other large company is as dominated by a single individual. Ellison cofounded Oracle in 1977 and has been chief executive for its entire existence. Among seminal figures in the computer industry, he is unique.

Microsoft's Bill Gates, a perennial rival, comes the closest to being like Ellison, having cofounded his company in 1975. But Gates stepped away from day-to-day operations in January 2000, handing over the CEO job to Steve Ballmer while retaining the title of chairman. Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy, a sometime partner, and Apple Computer's Steve Jobs, a friend of Ellison's, also come close. However, McNealy didn't become Sun's chief executive right away. And Jobs' tenure at Apple was interrupted when he was ousted in favor of John Sculley, although he later returned. So Ellison stands alone in having founded and continuously run his company for 26 years

In some ways, Ellison treats his company like it's still a start-up, with himself at the center, making decisions on everything from advertising to executive recruitment to product development.

In the early days, "Larry was a classic entrepreneur, all over every detail of the company," recalls Tom Siebel, who should know, because after becoming Oracle's top salesman he later founded his namesake company, Siebel Systems, an Oracle competitor. "Larry made every decision, controlled the board of directors, approved every large sales contract." Even today, when Oracle has 40,000 employees and around $10 billion in sales, Ellison's emotional impact is immense, in keeping with the huge Orwellian-like image he projects on-screen at company trade shows while he strides up to the stage.

Ellison, a true ham, loves to perform—no matter how large or small the audience. In front of even a few people, "Larry feels compelled to perform," says Gary Bloom, a former executive vice president and one-time heir apparent who left to run a company of his own, Veritas, in 2000. "He gives the gospel of Oracle through these non-stop performances. He'll give the same message 10 times with the same lines" at trade shows with thousands of customers and at executive and product development meetings with half a dozen executives.

The "gospel of Oracle," according to its primary interpreter Ellison, is that: 1. We have great technology; 2. Our competitors (whom he names and disses repeatedly) will never catch up; and 3. You should be buying from us because we can do it all—give you everything from the database to business applications.

Ellison has created Oracle in his own image. Now in his late 50s, tall and trim, he has kept himself in excellent shape. His hair is still dark, running to reddish; he has brown eyes and a short beard that helps to camouflage his long jaw. Ellison radiates enthusiasm and charm. He's animated and engaging on stage, at his best in informal Q&A sessions where he can rap with the crowd.

A fan of, and expert on, Japanese culture, he sees himself as a samurai warrior. He also likes to quote a saying attributed to Genghis Khan: "It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail." Ellison made Oracle into the giant it is today by means of his vision, his personality, his determination, his choices. But Oracle also made Ellison what he is today: wealthy, famous, able to proclaim his views on a world stage. So if Larry is Oracle and Oracle is Larry, what does that mean for the company?

For one thing, it means that Oracle's brand is inevitably bound up with Ellison's schizophrenic image—that of a brilliant visionary who can be brutal to those who work for him. By identifying so completely with Oracle, Ellison has insulated himself from other realities, like his difficulties in relating one-on-one with other people.

When you listen to former executives like Ray Lane who, generally with cause, fiercely dislikes Ellison, it's easy enough to dismiss him as a "Darth Vader" who has gone over to the dark side of Silicon Valley's testosterone-fueled culture in his obsession with making money and building the most important software company in the world. (Not that Ellison is the only one possessed by this goal, but he is one of the loudest and longest-surviving.)

But then you hear him rhapsodize over the sunrise that followed the dangerous 1998 Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race that could have killed him, and you realize that Ellison is an extraordinarily complex individual. He runs the emotional gamut, from poet to driven genius, from frat boy to insightful visionary, from aging athlete to thoughtful philanthropist.

"I'll never forget the race down to Hobart when I had the wheel. I couldn't handle it. There were no stars, you couldn't even see the sails, I didn't know what to steer by. I had to turn the wheel over (to someone else). You discover your own limits." He chokes up, in a manner that doesn't seem fake, when he talks about it. Six sailors on other boats and several yachts were lost when hurricane-force winds battered the participants in the deadly race.

Then there's the other side of Ellison, the self- absorbed leader who has systematically purged Oracle of nearly all the executives who helped him turn around the company in the early 1990s and build it into today's behemoth.

That's the Ellison who decided to make a hostile bid for PeopleSoft, an important rival in the business applications business run by one of those deposed Oracle executives, Craig Conway. Conway was livid, describing Ellison's move as "diabolical" and "straight out of Genghis Khan." Ellison wasn't particularly interested in PeopleSoft's employees, most of whom he reportedly planned to jettison, nor in its product. It was a market share play, pure and simple.

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