Question 1

True or false: Larry Ellison dropped out of college twice before founding Oracle.

Accepted Answer

True. He left the University of Chicago after one semester and later dropped out of the University of Illinois; he never earned a degree.

Question 2

True or false: Ellison's personal yacht, the 'Rising Sun,' is longer than a football field.

Accepted Answer

True. The Rising Sun is 453 feet long—over 1.3 football fields. It was co-owned with David Geffen for a time.

Question 3

True or false: Ellison has been married four times, including to a novelist and a restaurant hostess.

Accepted Answer

True. His wives include Adda Quinn, Nancy Wheeler Jenkins, Barbara Boothe (novelist), and Melanie Craft (romance novelist), plus a brief marriage to a hostess.

Question 4

True or false: Ellison purchased an entire Hawaiian island for over $300 million.

Accepted Answer

True. In 2012, he bought 98% of Lanai, including two hotels and infrastructure, for roughly $300 million. He also owns a private jet fleet.

Question 5

True or false: Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle with the idea of building a relational database after reading a paper by Edgar Codd.

Accepted Answer

True. Ellison and co-founders Bob Miner and Ed Oates created Oracle based on Codd's 1970 paper on relational databases, a breakthrough at the time.

Question 6

True or false: Larry Ellison once worked as a programmer for NASA on the Apollo project.

Accepted Answer

False. Ellison never worked for NASA; he worked on an Ampex database project for the CIA, codenamed 'Oracle,' which inspired his company's name.

Question 7

True or false: Ellison was the original CEO of Tesla before Elon Musk took over.

Accepted Answer

False. Tesla's original CEO was Martin Eberhard; Ellison was an early investor and briefly served on Tesla's board, but never as CEO.

Question 8

True or false: Ellison once challenged Bill Gates to a duel over who had the bigger yacht.

Accepted Answer

False. No such duel occurred; however, Ellison's yacht is indeed larger than Gates's, and their rivalry is well-documented—but not in a duel.

Larry Ellison Trivia Questions