College Dropouts Who Made It Big - Larry Ellison

Lawrence Joseph Ellison (1944-) , co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, founded his company in 1977 with a sum of $2,000. Once a school dropout, he is now, according to Forbes, one of the richest people in America with a net worth of around $184 crores. The figure also makes him the ninth richest in the world.

As a young man, Ellison worked for the Ampex Corporation, where one of his projects was a database for the CIA. He called it Oracle, a name he was to reuse years later for the company that made him famous.

Interestingly, the organisation' s initial release was Oracle 2. The number supposedly implied that all bugs had been eliminated from an earlier version.

Ellison is quite a colourful man, and has long dabbled in all kinds of things. Want to learn more? Try his biography, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison.