Question 1

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

Accepted Answer

True. He dropped out of the University of Illinois after two years when his mother died, and later dropped out of the University of Chicago after one semester.

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: 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 4

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 5

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

Accepted Answer

False. Larry Ellison has been married four times: to Adda Quinn, Nancy Wheeler Jenkins, Barbara Boothe (an artist/writer), and Melanie Craft (romance novelist). None were a restaurant hostess.

Question 6

True or false: Ellison purchased 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai for over $300 million.

Accepted Answer

True. In 2012, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison bought 98% of Lanai, including its resorts and infrastructure, for an estimated $300 million.

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: Larry Ellison purchased the Hawaiian island of Lanai in 2012.

Accepted Answer

True. In 2012, Ellison bought 98% of the island of Lanai for approximately $300 million.

Larry Ellison Trivia Questions