• Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and entrepreneur who co-founded the software company Oracle Corporation. He was Oracle's chief executive officer from 1977 to 2014 and is now its chief technology officer and executive chairman. He is a centibillionaire and the second-richest person in the world as of November 2025.
• On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $393 billion. Ellison is also known for his ownership of 98 percent of Lanai, the sixth-largest island in the Hawaiian Islands.
  

Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in New York City to a Jewish mother, Florence Spellman. His biological father was an Italian-American United States Army Air Corps pilot. After Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother gave him to her aunt and uncle for adoption. He did not meet Spellman again until he was 48.

Ellison moved with his adoptive parents to Chicago's South Shore, then a primarily Jewish middle-class neighborhood. He remembers his adoptive mother, Lillian Spellman Ellison, as warm and loving. He found his adoptive father, Louis Ellison, to be austere, unsupportive, and often distant. A government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression, Louis had chosen his last name to honor Ellis Island, his point of entry into the United States.