Softwar

by Matthew Symonds

  By the time Ellison started seeing Kathleen O’Rourke in 1989, he was in his midforties, Oracle was riding high, and he was well on his way to his first billion dollars. He remembers, “I was walking into our new headquarters building and there behind the reception desk was the most angelically beautiful smiling face I’d ever seen. I walked up to her and said, ‘Hi, I’m Larry Ellison.’ She said, ‘Hi, Larry Ellison, I’m Kathleen O’Rourke, and this is my first day at work.’ . . . About five minutes later, John Luongo, the head of our international sales organization, came bursting into my office and blurted out, ‘Who the hell is that girl at the—’ Before he could finish his sentence, I answered, ‘Kathleen O’Rourke.’ Kathleen was hard to miss.”

  Ellison quickly found out that Kathleen had recently graduated from Stanford and rode her bicycle to work from her home in Palo Alto. An avid cyclist himself, Ellison suggested that if he brought his bike in the next day, they could ride home together. Just two days after starting at Oracle, Kathleen was leaving work with the guy who ran the company. Catching sight of them about to ride off together, John Luongo drove up to them, lowered his car window, looked first at Kathleen, then at Ellison, and observed amicably, “You’ll burn in Hell for this.” To which Ellison replied, “I think that’s a fair trade.”

  Kathleen had only a hazy idea about how rich her new boyfriend was. “Soon after we started dating, Kathleen became very concerned about how much money I was spending. When she found out how much the new house in Atherton cost, she got upset and told me I was crazy for spending so much of my money on a house. So I asked her, ‘Kathleen, how much money do you think I have?’ She said, ‘Well, I looked in the annual report, and it says you have twenty million dollars.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve got twenty million shares, not twenty million dollars.’ Her eyes got wide as she did the multiplication in her head, ‘Oh my God, you’re really rich.’ Kathleen majored in biology, not economics.”

  Although Ellison had strong feelings about Kathleen, they were not so overwhelming that he thought they should get married or that he should stop seeing other women. Ellison says, “I was madly in love with Kathleen, more in love than I had ever been up to that point in my life. She wanted to get married. I loved her dearly, but marriage scared the hell out of me. And our relationship was not one hundred percent perfect. Kathleen had this incendiary Irish temperament. When she couldn’t make her point by yelling, she started swinging. She looked like an angel, but she punched like Tommy ‘The Hitman’ Hearns. Kathleen just loved to fight.3 It was her favorite sport. She found it cathartic. Not me. I can’t sleep after a fight. I hate confrontations. All the fighting eventually caused me to start dating other people—which led to still more fighting.”

  What made things even more difficult for Kathleen was Ellison’s propensity to find most of his girlfriends at Oracle. While some companies (usually with little success) try to maintain strict rules designed to discourage sexual relationships between employees, unsurprisingly, that was never part of the culture at Oracle. Ellison explains, “Oracle was filled with bright, good-looking, single young men and women spending most of their waking hours at work. It never occurred to me to have a policy restricting dating among our employees. Meeting interesting, eligible people was one the benefits of working at Oracle. We had dozens of Oracle marriages and Oracle babies every year.”

  By now Ellison was beginning to get the playboy reputation that has stuck with him ever since. He’s honest enough to recognize that he did nothing to discourage it. “I admit, at first I kind of liked it. It’s a guy thing—an immature guy thing, to be precise. But it got way out of control. Journalists started reporting on rumors that I was dating this woman or that woman—women I had never even met. But the stories got repeated over and over again anyway. The press operates like an echo chamber. The story doesn’t need to be true, necessarily; it just needs to be interesting. It didn’t take long for my public image to get morphed from outrageously outspoken CEO to frivolous playboy.” The freewheeling culture at Oracle and the sheer amount of opportunity it offered its CEO was to land Ellison in very serious trouble—trouble bad enough to almost finish him.

  Having emerged in 1992 from the long struggle to put Oracle back together again after its near death, and tiring of the fights with Kathleen, Ellison was on the lookout for sexual adventure. He soon found rather more than he’d bargained for. His relationship with Adelyn Lee, a twenty-something Chinese American who was a marketing coordinator, began in an elevator at Oracle. Ellison had ridden up in the elevator with her a few times before, but this time, she brashly asked him if he would take her for a spin in his new Ferrari. It seemed like a joke, but she quickly followed it up with an e-mail, apologizing for her forwardness. Ellison knew that he was being pursued—unattached, enormously rich, and looking younger than his forty-eight years, he was becoming relatively accustomed to predatory females—but Adelyn Lee interested him. “A lot of women approached me, but most of the time I wasn’t interested. But there was something different about Adelyn, something incredibly intriguing. I just couldn’t figure out what it was that made her so different.”4

  After taking Lee for a ride in his Honda NSX (Ellison had owned two Ferraris, but both had managed to catch fire without any outside help), they started dating a couple of times a month—all that Ellison could fit into a complicated private life that still included O’Rourke and another Oracle employee, an Argentinean named Andrea Zeman. In an effort to try to work things through with O’Rourke, Ellison called time on his relationship with Lee, a decision she seemed to accept with good grace and an apparent desire to stay in touch “on a platonic level.” The good intentions didn’t last long, however, and fairly soon things were going on much as before.

  But there was one difference: Lee seemed to be increasingly intent on tapping Ellison for money and expensive gifts, sending a series of e-mails to him from early 1993 asking him respectively for a $150,000 loan; inside information about the timing of a possible flotation of nCUBE (the massively parallel computing business that Ellison had bought to further his video-on-demand vision); a ritzy watch and ultimately a Honda NSX just like Ellison’s. Faced with such a barrage of demands, some people might question what it was that was driving the relationship. But while Ellison largely ignored Lee’s badgering, he was quite happy to go on seeing her.

  It turned out that Lee was exploiting the relationship in other ways as well. Ellison says, “Craig Ramsey, our VP of sales, was Lee’s boss. He called Jenny [Overstreet, Ellison’s assistant] and said that he wanted to fire Lee, but he was concerned about how I’d react because of my relationship with Lee.” Lee was unpunctual, rude, and generally gave herself airs, said Ramsey. Overstreet discreetly checked with Ellison. Ellison says, “I told Jenny that Craig could do whatever he wanted. The fact that she’s going out with me shouldn’t influence him at all. That Friday, Adelyn and I went to a movie. The following Monday, she was fired. Shortly thereafter, she sued Oracle for wrongful termination.”

  Ellison had thought that he could somehow manage to stay out of the whole business, punctiliously not only maintaining the “separation of church and state” but, just as important from his point of view, avoiding any confrontation with Lee. “I wouldn’t have anything to do with her job. I wanted to stay out of that entirely. I guess I was stupid and naive enough to think I could keep the two things separate. I refused to accept that two consenting adults were not free to date if they wanted to. I couldn’t imagine that she’d just make up a crazy series of stories about what happened on that Friday night.” That Friday in April 1993, Lee had gone to Ellison’s home in Atherton. After spending some time there together, they had gone out to a movie. When Lee’s case came to court six months later, that was about all they did agree on.

  A day after Lee’s dismissal—she had to be escorted from the Oracle building by security guards after locking herself in a room and trying to phone her lover—Ellison had a nasty surprise while going through his e-mail. “I g
et this e-mail from Craig Ramsey saying: ‘Larry, I’ve terminated Adelyn per your request. cdr.’ I’m stunned and furious. I start pounding the keyboard: ‘Craig, you fucking idiot, what the hell are you talking about? I never told you to fire Adelyn. Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Then I freeze. . . . I realize. . . . Oh my God, it’s a setup. . . . Oh shit, here we go. So I erase what I had typed and send Craig a very carefully worded reply.”

  Ellison’s reply, which was copied to Oracle’s legal counsel Ray Ocampo and Jenny Overstreet, read, “craig, are you out of your mind! I did not ‘request’ that you terminate adelyn. I decided not to veto your decision. I did not want to get involved in the decision for obvious reasons. this is the most amazing note. wait a second. . . . craig, did you send this note? larry.”

  Although Ellison had been smart enough to guess what was going on and how anything he said or wrote from that point on was likely to be used in evidence, things would soon get worse than he could possibly have imagined. “Lee’s lawsuit claimed that I dragged her into my bedroom and forced her to have sex with me, after which we went out to see a movie, Benny & Joon. That’s the story that appeared in the press—except they left out the part about the movie. The day the story broke, I was riding the elevator to my office with this woman I’d never seen before. She gave me this look, like I’d slithered out from underneath a rock. It was a really bad day.”

  Not surprisingly, it was a media circus as first Lee’s allegations and then Oracle’s counterallegations were splattered all over the local press. With Ellison’s fame as a businessman also rising thanks to his first appearance on the cover of Fortune magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times also covered the story. Apart from demolishing Lee’s account of events, Oracle was determined to show that Lee had forged the e-mail purportedly from Ramsey (which Lee, suspiciously, had a printout of). It had technical evidence that the e-mail had been sent by modem near where Lee lived, but the clincher was that Ramsey had been talking on his car cell phone at precisely the time the e-mail had been sent. Oracle could also show that the procedures to sack Lee had been well under way before Ellison and Lee’s last date. The police also thought Lee’s story was a little flaky—rape followed by a trip to the movies was something they hadn’t encountered before. Under pressure, Lee now claimed that she had refused to have sex with Ellison, suggesting instead that she had reluctantly masturbated him after he had threatened her. Ellison says, “Lee completely changed her story during her deposition—her pretrial testimony given under oath. Her new story was that she refused to have sex with me that Friday and that’s why she was fired. The fact that her story had changed totally didn’t seem to bother the press at all. While the district attorney and the police were interested in the credibility of her claims, the press focused their reporting on the lurid details of the sex. It was a good story, and they ran with it.”

  Just before the case was due to come to court, on St. Valentine’s Day 1995, the two sides settled. Oracle agreed to pay Lee $100,000 (somewhat less than the $1 billion she was after) “as consideration for particular elements in the law suit” and all parties agreed to drop any intention of suing each other again. It’s easy to see that Lee’s lawyer, Lawrence Viola, had concluded that it wasn’t in his client’s interests to go to court, but why were Ellison and Oracle willing to settle when doing so would leave a stain on his reputation?

  Part of the answer is that in the aftermath of the O. J. Simpson case, Ellison was ready to believe that courts come up with spectacularly perverse verdicts. It would not be difficult to present him to a jury as a sexually predatory billionaire who was known for ruthless business practices and a determination to get his way. In the climate of the times, who knew what might happen? Ellison also heard from his nephew, Jimmy Linn, now a Chicago judge, just how bad the experience could be. Ellison says, “The judge told me that trials like this were totally unpredictable. It’s one great big scary roll of the dice. If it came down to a matter of ‘He said, she said,’ juries don’t always get it right. The downside was too great. Losing the case would ruin my life. He urged me to settle.”5

  Despite that, Ellison claims that he was still inclined to press ahead—“Risky or not, I felt I had to go to trial. Lee was a con artist. It was unbearable to think she was going to get away with this.” Until he realized that maybe there was a better way after all. He says, “Then I got this interesting idea: What if we settled the civil case—Lee’s wrongful termination lawsuit—and then we provided the district attorney with all the evidence we had about Lee’s criminal behavior. I thought that the D.A. would have no choice but to file a criminal complaint against Lee. We were the defendant in Lee v. Oracle. Now it was her turn to be the defendant in the State of California v. Lee. She had violated several criminal statutes in her little billion-dollar shakedown scheme. And we could prove it.”

  It turned out to be uphill work. When Oracle’s lawyers went to see the district attorney of San Mateo County, James Fox, he told them that he had no interest in pursuing the case. Finally Ellison himself saw Fox. “I was not happy. Fox seemed to be unwilling to even look at the case? He’s the D.A. It’s his job to look at the evidence and then decide whether or not to prosecute. After a rather heated discussion, he finally agreed to have an assistant D.A. review the case. A couple of days later, into my office walks Paul Wasserman, San Mateo County’s smartest, toughest assistant district attorney. Wasserman immediately starts asking me a series of prepared questions carefully designed to trip me up if I was lying. As I answer question after question, I watch the expression on Wasserman’s face slowly change from disdainful skepticism to mild amusement. Then he gets this big grin on his face, he starts shaking his head from side to side, and then he start laughing. I’m just staring at him, unable to figure out what the hell is going on. He stops laughing for a moment and says, ‘I didn’t expect this, but I believe what you’re telling me. Boy, did you get fucked. God, are you stupid. Why did you go out with her?’ Then he starts laughing again. He just thinks it’s hilarious. Then I tell him that I wasn’t a defendant; I was really just a witness. ‘Witness?’ he says, ‘man, you’re not a witness, you’re the victim. Who would believe it? Larry Ellison the victim? This is funny!’ I didn’t think it was funny, but I was glad he believed me.”

  Not only was Wasserman prepared to take the case, another powerful piece of evidence came to light that further undermined Lee. Andrea Zeman, the Argentinean woman Ellison had been going out with at the same time as he was seeing Lee, had read about the case in the newspapers. After several fruitless attempts to call Ellison, she finally got through with some very interesting information. It turned out that Lee had once telephoned her and had said, “I understand we’re both dating Larry Ellison. You know, if we play our cards right, we can each get a million dollars out of this.” Zeman replied, “Really? I was just hoping for dinner.” Ellison asked her if she was willing to testify to that in court. “That’s why I called,” she said. Zeman had broken off with Ellison a couple of years earlier and had left Oracle. Before doing so she had written Ellison a letter explaining her reasons. Ellison says, “It was one of the most thought-provoking letters I’ve ever received. It was a brilliantly written explanation of my unwillingness to take emotional risks. It was so insightful that it made me want to date her again. But she was too smart to fall into that trap a second time.” But luckily for Ellison, the sincere and serious Zeman was a perfect witness.

  Ellison also turned out to be a pretty good witness when the case eventually came to court almost four years after Lee’s departure from Oracle and the technical evidence relating to Lee’s forgery was conclusive. She was convicted of two counts of perjury and one of creating false evidence. She was sentenced to spend a year in jail without parole and to give back the $100,000 she had earlier received in settlement from Oracle. To make matters worse for Lee, she was also sentenced to an additional three years in prison for a bizarre incident in which she had burst into a next-
door neighbors’ home brandishing a gun and told them that if they didn’t turn off the music that was disturbing her, she would blow them away. Lee claimed she had been holding a comb rather than a gun. But nobody believed her.

  Ellison still feels bitter about the effect of the Lee case on his reputation. He complains that her allegations received infinitely more media coverage than the fact that they were eventually disproved in court. A Washington Post writer, putting together a big profile on Ellison in late 2000, assured him that he wouldn’t be writing about the Lee affair, as if it were something that Ellison should be ashamed of. “The article was a hatchet job,” says Ellison. “And me being a victim just didn’t fit with the rest of his story.”6

  • • •

  In the years after the break-up with Kathleen O’Rourke, Ellison’s life was quite lonely. Steve Jobs could see that his friend’s personal life was less than satisfactory: “Larry had been married a few times, and he was working really hard, and he just ended up doing some of the things in his forties that most people do in their twenties, except that Larry had more resources than most people in their twenties, so he did it on a rather grander scale. After breaking up with Kathleen, he went out with a lot of people, but I think that after a certain amount of time he realized that it wasn’t very fulfilling.” Another friend, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Dr. Joshua Lederberg, recalls, “At that time, he had almost no one staffing the house, maybe just a housekeeper and one other. There was no one else there. I would sometimes have to enrich his pantry. I thought he was leading a very lonely life.”7

  Whether or not Ellison was searching for a more serious relationship when he met Melanie Craft while departing a crowded San Francisco restaurant in 1996, it’s hard to argue with him when he claims that it was love at first sight: “I took one look at her, and I was finished.” There was something about the striking twenty-six-year-old with the high cheekbones and flowing dark blond hair that made him go over and start talking to her. Craft, who was at Bix with a girlfriend, says, “He just sauntered up and introduced himself. He told me who he was in the first few minutes, but I’d never heard of Oracle. I guess he sort of chatted me up—I don’t know what else you could call it.”