[Infowarrior] - Larry Ellison Stepping Down as Chief of Oracle

[Richard Forno]

Larry Ellison Stepping Down as Chief of Oracle

By QUENTIN HARDY

SEPT. 18, 2014


SAN FRANCISCO — Lawrence J. Ellison is retiring as chief executive of Oracle Corporation, a company he founded in 1977 that has transformed the business world and made him one of the world’s richest people.

His departure, announced on Thursday, is one of the last exits of the tech industry’s first generation of celebrity executives, who took computers from the back offices of a few big institutions and into the mainstream of everyday life.

Mr. Ellison, who turned 70 last month, said he was leaving as a normal part of succession planning.

Mr. Ellison will become executive chairman, and will continue to work on Oracle’s technology, the company said in a statement announcing the move. Oracle’s software and hardware is involved with the ways that companies and large organizations store and manage their data, as well as sophisticated applications for running things like international manufacture, nationwide retail and corporate financial systems.

The current chairman, Jeffrey O. Henley, will become vice chairman. The chief executive job will be shared by Mark V. Hurd, currently co-president, and Safra A. Catz, who is co-president and chief financial officer.

It is unusual for big technology firms to have split responsibilities at the top, but so far the two have split much of running Oracle, a company with over 120,000 employees. Mr. Hurd runs service and sales, while Ms. Catz oversees operations and finance.

Neither has Mr. Ellison’s technological expertise, nor is likely to cast anything like the shadow that Mr. Ellison has over his 37-year career.

Along with Bill Gates at Microsoft and Andy Grove at Intel, Mr. Ellison was one of the most important — and flamboyant — figures of tech’s early boom years.

His personal fortune, estimated by Bloomberg at about $46 billion, has helped Mr. Ellison become one of the technology industry’s most recognizable individuals. He has been married four times, and in 2013 his sailboat racing team, Oracle Team USA, won the America’s Cup for the second time in San Francisco.

A licensed pilot and collector of exotic aircraft, he lives on an estate in Woodside, Calif., valued at over $100 million, and maintains several other properties as well as a yacht nearly the length of a football field. He purchased the 141-square-mile Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012 for a reported $300 million, and is in the process of turning the land into a technology-infused sustainable community.

< - >

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/technology/larry-ellison-steps-down-as-chief-of-oracle.html?_r=0

---
Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.