Larry Ellison was 9 months old when severe pneumonia nearly killed him.
He was born in the Bronx to a 19-year-old single mother who didn’t have the resources to care for him. So she gave him up for adoption to her aunt and her aunt’s husband, who lived in Chicago.
He grew up without knowing the truth. At 12 years old, he discovered it almost by accident: his parents weren’t his biological parents. His relationship with the man who raised him was cold. He told him over and over that he would never amount to anything.
His adoptive mother was the only source of warmth he had. She died of cancer during his second year of college, and Larry, devastated, dropped out, first in Illinois and then in Chicago.
He moved to California with almost nothing and worked as a programmer. In 1977, along with two partners, he founded a small software company that would become Oracle years later.
The child whose own mother couldn’t care for him ended up building one of the largest technology companies in the world.