Softwar

by Matthew Symonds

  Things have been more difficult for Anne. Ellison describes her as “bright and talented,” but he thinks that she’s not found it easy adjusting to the reality of her half-brother’s extraordinary wealth. “Anne and Steve are quite different. I supported Anne through school and I’ve given her money when she’s needed it. That’s very easy for me to do because I have lots of money, but sometimes I’ve wondered whether it was the right thing for her. Happiness and self-reliance have a funny way of going together. She’s just got her teaching credential, so she’s chosen a very difficult, poorly paid but otherwise rewarding profession. I admire anyone who tries walking down that road.”

  As for Florence, she lived on for eight more years in her comfortable new waterside home with Anne before getting terminal cancer. If the relationship with Ellison deepened at all, it’s not something he’s willing to admit. He visited her two or three times a year and at least a couple of times when she was near the end in the hospital. He never wanted his two children to meet her. If he had trouble showing her much warmth, the same seems to have been true of her. Although, according to Ellison, she liked to boast about her son the multibillionaire, she never expressed much in the way of pride in his accomplishments to him. To that extent, it was like Lou Ellison all over again.

  Ellison confesses to feeling some anger about what he rather harshly describes as her willingness to “trade” on his success: “I thought it was undignified for her to brag about ‘her son’s’ money. I wasn’t really her son—she had given that up a long time ago.” Ellison saw Florence on the night she died, and again he felt that she was still asking forgiveness. “I told her she had been very, very young and in an impossible situation. She had no choice, really. She had to give me up. I said everything I could think of to try to help her cope with her emotional pain, but there was nothing I or anyone else could do about the cancer pain. It’s a hideous, sadistic disease. In its late stages, the only effective painkiller is death.”

  Finding and coming to terms with his blood relations meant that, for the first time, Ellison had no doubt who his real family was. He says, “Anyone who’s been adopted has an uncertain sense of belonging. There’s this ambiguity about which family is your ‘real’ family. Meeting my birth mother resolved all that for me. The family that raised me is my family. They’re stuck with me. I’m very attached to my sister and the Judge!” Jimmy Linn remembers the moment well: “He looked in my mother’s eyes and said, ‘As soon as I met her, I knew who my real family was. I know who I am now.’ ”

  The relationship with the Linns continues to be of huge importance to Ellison, and he sees them as often as possible. Usually Doris and Jimmy with his wife, Elyse, and two daughters join Ellison for holidays on his boats several times a year. Whenever possible, Ellison sends his plane to Chicago to fly them to wherever Katana or Ronin is cruising. Whenever a car in Ellison’s automobile fleet is up for renewal (a pretty regular event), it’s more likely to be shipped to Jimmy’s garage in Chicago than traded in. With the Linns he’s probably more relaxed and happy than at any other time in his life. With Jimmy in particular, the affection seems almost physical, with much hugging and kissing. There may be an element of overcompensation in Ellison’s emotional outpouring toward his adopted family; it’s as if he’s making up for the time when he was confused and uncertain about his identity. But there is something touching about his urgent need to both give and receive unconditional love; the kind of love he felt he didn’t get from Lou. The scars of adoption never quite heal.

  • • •

  Ellison’s need to demonstrate unconditional love is, naturally enough, at its strongest with his two children, David and Megan. It would have been easy—and not exactly unusual—if Ellison had lost contact with his children, given that they were both still very young (David was three, Megan still in diapers) when he and their mother, Barbara, were divorced. But, to the surprise of many, Ellison, from the outset, worked hard on his relationship with them. Part of that meant staying on reasonable terms with Barbara. Ellison says, “I was determined to remain friends with Barbara and provide as much emotional and financial support as I could. It’s impossible to raise healthy, happy children if their parents are at war.”

  It’s often underestimated how much fatherhood changes even men who are not paragons of monogamy. Ellison says, “It was amazing. My personality fundamentally changed as a result of me becoming a father. I had expected a change when I got married, but I woke up the next morning feeling exactly as I did the day before. But being a father made me sensitive to the needs and feelings of my kids, and then that gradually seeped over into my other relationships. I became a more considerate friend and partner. I grew up.” Barbara and the children continued to live in Woodside, while Ellison moved to nearby Atherton. Most weekends, they would go and stay with him. He even claims to have gotten pretty good at dealing with Megan’s diaper changes and enjoying the experience: “A primal bond is formed between a primary caregiver and a small child. Biology takes over. Your brain is flooded with oxytocin, and this little person becomes a part of you.” Imagining Ellison, the “new man,” mystically in touch with his female side while taping up Megan’s diapers in the lonely small hours is a stretch, but he insists it’s true.3

  The weekend routine was interrupted only by occasional crises at Oracle. Ellison admits, “When the company was in trouble, I was a less attentive father. Barbara knew that as long as I was seeing the kids regularly, everything at work was okay, even if the stock was down. But if I disappeared from the kids’ lives for a while, like in 1991, something bad must be happening. During those times I became so focused on work and survival that I locked everything else out—even the kids.” The children were also kept away from casual girlfriends, getting to know only the two women with whom Ellison has had serious long-term relationships, Kathleen O’Rourke and Melanie Craft. As always, Ellison is ultrasensitive to any taint of hypocrisy or political correctness. “I don’t claim to be a dutiful father. I just get so much pleasure from my kids. I suspect I need them a lot more than they need me.”

  Ellison makes no attempt to pretend that his children will have to make their own way in the world or to shield them from the potentially corrosive knowledge that they can have whatever material thing they want whenever they want it. David has a BMW M3 at college and a Honda NSX at home to drive, while Megan’s first car was a Lexus 430SC convertible. With the best coaching and equipment, both excel at their (expensive) chosen sports—competitive aerobatics for David, equestrian events for Megan. Although two of David’s best friends are relatively poor (Ellison has helped finance their education through both school and university), most of their circle is made up of rich kids who seem to think nothing of being transported by private jet for a week’s holiday on “Camp Ronin” in Tahiti. Does Ellison not worry about the effects that exposure to enormous wealth and privilege might have on them?

  One evening, sitting with Ellison aboard Katana at anchor outside the picture-perfect Italian resort of Portofino, I asked him what it is that he wants for his children. He says simply that he hopes they will be happy. And what does he think will constitute happiness for them? Twenty-four hours earlier, Megan had been racing speedboats across the bay of Saint-Tropez with the son of the Saudi billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed. She certainly seemed to be having a good time. Was that enough? Ellison says that he has come to believe that an essential precondition of happiness is self-esteem—maybe because it’s something he’s found only fairly late in life: “It takes a good deal of confidence and self-esteem before you’re able to look at yourself and the world honestly. I do my best not to deceive myself, and I think I see the world pretty realistically. I wasn’t able to do any of that until I became reasonably successful at the two things Freud says are important in life: love and work. When my family and friends and Oracle are doing well, I’m happy.” Ellison is convinced that growing up with unlimited money shouldn’t be an obstacle to success in either of those things�
�love or work—for his children. “I think it’s wonderful that my kids don’t have to worry about money. For them, earning money isn’t necessary for survival, so they can move on to the other challenges in life.”

  He recognizes that it may be difficult for his children to emulate his business success, which, he says, “was largely responsible for initially building up my self-esteem.” But he believes there are plenty of other things they can do and things they can achieve other than amassing money. It will be up to them to decide what it is that they want to be good at. The second component of self-respect, according to Ellison, is the simple matter of treating other people decently. Some would say that this is, for Ellison, a pretty recent discovery, but I know that he means it. He insists, “Being insensitive, rude, or mean to someone close to you, or to a perfect stranger for that matter, is self-destructive and self-degrading behavior. You’ll think less of yourself for doing it. Being nice is an essential strategy for pursuing happiness. That plus excelling at your life’s work are the only avenues leading to happiness that I’ve found so far. I don’t think that masses of money increase or decrease your chances for finding happiness in this life.”4

  I think he’s being a little glib. Both of his means of achieving happiness are more difficult to find if you have a lot of money: if your choices are unlimited, it’s too easy to be a dilettante, and the rich are doomed to wonder whether they are loved for themselves or for their wealth. Ellison strongly disagrees. “It takes about five seconds for me to detect that someone is interested in me solely because I’m rich. It’s really very easy to tell.” As for work, he says, “If you have to work to eat, you have to choose a profession fairly early in life. Search too long, and you’ll starve. You may get lucky and pick something you’re good at and enjoy doing. That’s what happened to me. But if you have money, you can keep searching forever. Seemingly there’s no need to choose. But it just seems that way. You must find a meaningful life’s work, or you’ll starve emotionally. It’s your work that defines you. Rich kids start a couple of rungs up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s all. They don’t have to earn money, so they have more options. They can go into politics, play in the orchestra, or run a charitable foundation. But unless they work and succeed at something, they’ll never be happy and they’ll never know who they are.”

  Ellison has always given his children access to a lot of money. “You can’t create artificial poverty to teach your kids what it’s like to be poor. It’s like sending a kid to bed without dinner to teach them about hunger. It’s phony, and kids see right through it. The sooner my kids get experience dealing with the pluses and minuses of having a lot of money, the better.” He hopes they will get used to making the decisions that go with extreme wealth while they are still young enough to accept some parental guidance. He says it’s like taking a drink. He’d prefer his children to learn to drink at home rather than discover alcohol for the first time when they pass some arbitrary age qualification.

  I’m curious about why Ellison has encouraged David to take up the seriously dangerous sport of stunt flying. It seems it all comes back to self-esteem. Early on, Ellison realized how difficult David might find it growing up in the shadow of such a famous and successful father. He wouldn’t have been the first child in such circumstances to damage himself, either through a vain attempt to compete or by retreating into a form of personal nihilism. Ellison says, “It’s incredibly important for teenage boys to be cool. The danger lies in trying to be cool the wrong way—drinking and driving fast, taking drugs, and all that other self-destructive stuff. Even if they don’t die in a traffic accident, they can still sustain a lot of emotional damage.” So Ellison thought about what was the best way he could guarantee his son a really cool self-image and hit on flying. From the age of thirteen, David has had his own plane and has regularly flown both Ellison’s Citation jet and his Marchetti jet fighter.

  Did Ellison not worry at all when David was flying? His answer is no, because worrying doesn’t make it any safer.5 He argues, “The statistics are on our side. We have wonderful airplanes that are perfectly maintained, and David has the best aerobatics instructors on the planet.” I point out that despite all that, just the other day David could have gotten into trouble when he lost his canopy. “He managed the emergency quite well and landed the airplane without incident. David has developed into a very calm and mature kid. Putting him into an airplane early had that effect on him. One serious mistake, and it’s over. He became responsible for his own life the first time he went up in an airplane by himself.”

  Ellison is close to both his children, but it’s clear that his relationship with David is currently a good deal easier than the one with Megan. While David gives every impression of being relaxed and at ease with himself, Megan is suffering from all the angst and rebelliousness of adolescence. But I suspect she is naturally wilder and more headstrong than David. In other words, she is more like her father. One question that Ellison hasn’t discussed with his children is how they would feel if he were to start a new family with Melanie. They both seem very fond of her, but who knows?6 My guess is that if the idea of it made either of them unhappy, Ellison would back off. From an unpromising start, he’s worked hard and consistently to keep his children close to him. Many of his friends regard it as both his greatest and most unlikely achievement.

  * * *

  1. LE writes: People regularly mistake obedience for intelligence. That’s why we think that dogs are more intelligent than cats. We measure intelligence as the speed at which animals learn to do what we want them to do. A dog will fetch a stick every time you throw it. A cat will look at you and wonder, If you wanted the stick, why did you throw it in the first place? Get it yourself, idiot. In reality, cats and dogs have similar intelligence levels but different survival strategies. The dog is dependent and must please to get regular meals. The cat will mooch off his human roommates, but if the food runs out the cat can survive on its own. I love golden retrievers, but I don’t want to be one. I’d much rather be a cat.

  2. LE writes: I was wrong about Oracle stock’s increasing in value by a factor of ten; it increased by a factor of ten thousand.

  3. LE writes: Okay. I don’t think I’m ever very likely to “get in touch with my female side.” But I did get pretty good at wiping and powdering bottoms and then taping on Huggies without ever being fully awake. Changing your kids’ diapers while you’re still asleep is an essential survival skill for parents of young children.

  4. LE writes: I don’t, however, believe in being nice to my enemies. My enemies are trying to deprive me of the success that led to my happiness. I want to beat my enemies, and it’s hard to be nice to them at the same time.

  5. LE writes: I seriously object to sports that are truly odds-on dangerous. David’s skydiving and sky-surfing days are over. After more than a hundred jumps he had an equipment failure that caused part of his primary parachute to wrap itself around his neck. He was able to cut away the failed primary chute and his air board and then deploy his reserve chute just in time. It was a very close call. He was going fast when he hit the ground, and he was seriously banged up. If I had understood how dangerous sky surfing was, I never would have let him do it in the first place. After his accident I learned that the two top-ranked sky surfers in the world had both recently died in accidents.

  6. LE writes: Melanie and the kids have spent a lot of time together. They’re nice kids, and she’s quite attached to them. They’re also both quite fond of her. Anyway, my kids get to pick who they marry, not who I marry.

  20

  THREE STRIKES, YOU’RE OUT

  Larry Ellison thinks he’s pretty good at most things. He’s forgotten more about programming than some of the kids working for Oracle will ever know. If he has a fast boat for the America’s Cup, he’ll drive it and still expect to win. He’s even quietly pleased about how he’s turned out as a father. But there’s one important life skill that has so far eluded him: holding a marriage
together. His third and most recent marriage, to Barbara Boothe, ended when she filed for divorce in April 1986, less than three months after the birth of his second child, Megan, and a month after Oracle’s initial public offering. The marriage had lasted less than three years. He says, “After that, I decided I just wasn’t any good at marriage. There’s a criminal law in California called three strikes and you’re out. . . . Maybe after three marriages, you shouldn’t be allowed a fourth.”

  It’s a reasonable, and in many ways convenient, conclusion. It’s meant that ever since breaking up with Barbara, Ellison has had a wonderful excuse for not entering into the kind of commitment that many of the women he has dated were hoping for. It’s also one of the main reasons for the playboy image that he has encouraged and resented in equal measure. By the time his third marriage ended, Ellison was already worth the best part of $200 million. Apart from the dog days of 1991, when he came close to losing nearly everything, since his early forties Larry Ellison has been in the enviable position of being one of the most eligible bachelors in California. It’s a status that he’s enjoyed, but it has also come close to destroying him.

  Ellison was married for the first time in early 1967, about a year after arriving in Berkeley in his turquoise T-bird. He was twenty-two, and Adda Quinn was about five months younger. She was a graduate of San Jose State University, and they met when he rolled up at an employment agency where she was working. He felt comfortable with her because she came from a similar lower-middle-class background. While the marriage lasted seven years, most of that time they didn’t live together. It was clear from the beginning that while Adda took the relationship very seriously, Ellison was a long way from being ready for the sort of commitment that he had entered in to.