After that came a helter-skelter of both corporate and personal commissions. Although Seccombe had never worked on a private house, she was intrigued enough by what Ellison wanted to achieve with his newly purchased Japanese-style villa in Atherton to leave her architectural practice and set up her own firm. When Oracle moved from Davis Drive to Redwood Shores in 1988, it was Seccombe and Ellison who between them created the look of the new campus whose gleaming cylindrical towers today dominate the flat Bay Area landscape, and as she says, “make a very powerful and sophisticated statement.” Of the interior she says, “Larry wanted an environment that would boost morale, so he was adamant that everything had to be done to a certain level of quality.” During Oracle’s crisis in the early 1990s, the extravagance of the campus, with its 35,000-square-foot gym, manicured gardens, and ornamental lake was used as a stick to beat Ellison with, but Seccombe believes that his commitment to quality has contributed to Oracle’s subsequent success. She says, “He’s unique in the industry both for his involvement and concern for aesthetics.”3
A very different domestic project from Ellison’s home at Atherton was the house he bought in 1991 in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. Designed by the celebrated architect Bill Wurster toward the end of his life for heirs of the Spreckels sugar dynasty, the house occupies a spectacular position on Broadway, looking out across the bay toward Sausalito with the Golden Gate Bridge to the left, Alcatraz to the right.
After much negotiation with the city authorities, who considered it a historic building, Ellison won permission to open up the whole of the back facade, essentially creating a single glass wall extending over four floors. Inside, Ellison wanted a highly modern, ultraminimalist look. Although conceptually far removed from his home in Atherton, according to Seccombe the houses have one thing in common: in both, what lay outside was what mattered most—in one the garden, in the other, the extraordinary views.
Seccombe has also redesigned the interiors of both Ronin and Katana, so it was natural for her to work with Jon Bannenberg from the outset, visualizing and designing interior spaces that would match the drama of Bannenberg’s naval architecture. However, Ellison deliberately kept her away from Paul Discoe and Sanbashi until the project was nearing completion. But with about eighteen months to go before he was due to move in, he asked her to get involved: any earlier, and she would inevitably have clashed with Discoe, demanding compromises that would have diluted the purity of his approach; any later, and it might have been impossible to make the compromises required for Ellison actually to be able to live there.
I sensed that Seccombe was troubled by Sanbashi, although that may just have been the understandable tension that existed between her and Discoe and the fact that she felt she had been brought in to “fix something” that was not her creation. She was much more enthusiastic about the collaboration with Bannenberg. “When Larry first talked to me about it, he said he wanted it to be like a floating Broadway. It will have the same discipline as Broadway. Things will only be there because they are functional or beautiful and absolutely correct. It’s what you take away that makes it perfect.”
• • •
In June 2002, Ellison flew to London from Bremen in his brand-new Bombardier Global Express (a $35 million replacement for the narrower-bodied GV). Because of work pressures and Bannenberg’s death, it was his first visit to the Lürssen yard since work on the new yacht had begun. The hull had recently been launched, but problems with cutting-edge glass-bonding technology had delayed the project, and delivery was now unlikely until 2004. What’s she like? I asked him. “Big,” said Ellison. “She’s very big.” It seemed like a curiously flat answer, and I said so.
Ellison sighed and said, “Yes. The boat is very beautiful—a kinetic sculpture made of metal and glass. But in a post–September eleventh world it seems excessive. Now everything that’s not essential seems excessive. Building beautiful gardens and beautiful boats have lost their place in the dangerous new world we live in. They no longer promise an escape from the world. There is no escape anymore.”
Ellison, in common with more than a few other high-profile CEOs, was also feeling the kickback against corporate greed following the Enron and Global Crossing scandals (WorldCom was still to come). While nobody suggested that there had been any cooking of the books at Oracle or that the company was anything other than immensely profitable, its stock was still bumping along the bottom and Ellison had been through a torrid couple of months during a pitched political battle in California over an Oracle software-licensing deal. He said, “Everyone’s so angry about all the money they lost. People feel they were cheated, and some were. But we need to be careful about separating the guilty from the innocent before we start marching people off to the guillotine.”
In other words, the great projects that Ellison had embarked upon with such confidence and optimism during tech’s “roaring nineties” now struck him as excessive and out of time. Ellison had been through a rough couple months, but somehow I didn’t think his gloom would last too long. It was more worrying that for the first time he seemed to be bending his knee to political correctness. That probably wouldn’t last, either.
* * *
1. LE writes: Shigeru is a genius. He’s the master sculptor who turned the garden into art.
2. LE writes: I’ve finally decided to call the new motor yacht Rising Sun. Sayonara will be reserved for a racing sailboat—if I ever build another one.
3. LE writes: Steve Jobs cares just as much about aesthetics as I do—maybe more.
22
A LIFE BEYOND ORACLE
When Joshua Lederberg addressed a Stanford University symposium in 1990, he didn’t notice Larry Ellison; nor is it likely that he would have known who he was.
The molecular biologist had left Stanford in 1978 after running the genetics department for some nineteen years but often returned to see old friends and engage in seminars and workshops. He had also had a fruitful collaboration with the university’s renowned computer science department, pioneering the development of artificial intelligence. Lederberg had long been interested in the ways in which computers could help in the planning of experiments. After giving his talk, Lederberg received a note from Ellison, explaining who he was and suggesting that they meet up sometime, as they had some shared interests.1
In the event, it was nearly two years before they got together; Lederberg lived in New York, where he was president of Rockefeller University, and Ellison had been fighting for his business life. When finally they met, at Ellison’s home on Isabella Avenue, the friendship that developed changed the lives of both men—the Nobel Prize–winning scientist and the brash Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Today, approaching eighty, Lederberg conforms perfectly to the popular idea of the distinguished polymath. Sartorially disheveled, with a great grizzled head, he speaks softly but with great precision and deliberation. You sense not just intellectual power but considerable moral force. There is something almost prophetic about him.
What were Lederberg’s first impressions of Ellison? “I knew nothing about the difficulties that Oracle had been through. He just seemed to me to be one of the smartest people I’d ever met,2 someone who was really fired up about what I considered to be a revolution in human communications as important as the printing press.” After a couple of meetings, Ellison said to Lederberg, “Here’s the key to my house. If you stay anywhere else when you’re out here, I’ll be very annoyed.” Though taking him up on his offer, Lederberg was struck by the contrast between Ellison’s beautiful house and the relatively frugal and even rather lonely life he seemed to live there. And while Ellison would frequently return late in the evening, ostensibly from Oracle, their wide-ranging discussions almost never touched on anything that was going on at Redwood Shores. Oracle and girlfriends had compartments in Ellison’s life, and so did Nobel Prize winners.
As far as Lederberg could see, Ellison’s interest in molecular biology was purely intellectual. He says, �
��I didn’t see him investing or getting practically involved. I had any number of connections with biotech companies, and I thought I’d be doing him a favor to mention some, but he didn’t seem to bite on any of those suggestions.” Lederberg and Ellison didn’t talk only about computers and genes. Lederberg was deeply involved in foreign and domestic policy, and he found some of Ellison’s views about the ability of technology and military force to solve problems “somewhat simplistic.” Gently he would suggest that maybe things were a little more complicated than Ellison had assumed: force sometimes had to be used sparingly, and technology would not automatically benefit the poor unless capitalism were tempered with some humanity.3 Lederberg observes dryly, “Larry is usually ready for some modulation when we get into the detail.”
Ellison’s willingness to learn from Lederberg wasn’t just confined to late-night intellectual schmoozing. In the summer of 1994, Ellison spent a fortnight’s “vacation” in Lederberg’s lab working as a humble technician. “He got his hands dirty and enjoyed it very much. He participated in our day-to-day discussions about how the experiments were being planned and the significance of the information we were getting from them. Within two or three days, he’d caught up enough to be able to play a real part—he has a very avid, quick mind. I think the experience helped to confirm his interest in this field, and I began to hear more and more from him about what was going on in other areas.”4
Soon afterward, Lederberg felt confident enough of Ellison’s seriousness and his friendship to ask him what he wanted to do with his money from a philanthropic point of view. He had just retired from Rockefeller University, so there was no question of putting the bite on Ellison for his own institution. He was convinced, however, that Ellison was ready to listen to some ideas. Lederberg says, “I knew something about philanthropic investment: what works and what doesn’t; what can really produce some serious returns; and how to organize it.”
Lederberg was careful not to put Ellison under any pressure. But after a series of conversations, the idea formed for Ellison to endow a medical research foundation. For years Ellison had been preoccupied with gaining a better understanding of cancer, the disease that had claimed the lives of his “two mothers” and his Oracle cofounder, Bob Miner. Given the speed at which medical science had been moving in other areas, Ellison thought that real progress in combating cancer had been “pretty dismal.”
Lederberg’s prompting could not have come at a better time. Having survived Oracle’s recent trauma and crushed most of its database competition with Oracle 7, Ellison was convinced that his company would now be able to handle whatever commercial rivals or the economy threw at it. For Ellison personally, there were two consequences. The first was that he was starting to get accustomed to the idea that he was not only extremely wealthy but highly likely to stay that way. The second was that he was ready for new challenges. Ellison says, “I’d always been curious about the fundamental mechanisms of molecular biology, and now I had this big lever—lots of money—that enabled me to influence the direction the research was going.”
For Ellison, simply writing checks to good causes was never an attractive option. Always distrustful of conventional altruism, Ellison needed to develop a version of philanthropy that would work for him. He says, “I really can’t distinguish my approach to philanthropy from my approach to anything else I take seriously. It’s about discovering my own limits and learning about what it means to be alive. I set goals and live my life in hot pursuit of them: I want to win the America’s Cup; I want Oracle to be number one in software; I want to help find cures for cancers. The America’s Cup is just a silly game; nevertheless, I work at it. Oracle’s an important business, so I work much harder at that. But you know, pursuing cures for cancer is incomparably more interesting and much more important than any of my other goals. So maybe that’s what I should focus the rest of my life on. As far as I can tell, ‘living large’ means working on the most interesting and important problems.” And there was another thing: Ellison’s lack of religious belief contributed strongly to his sense of waste when a life was cut short by premature death or debilitating illness. “Fundamentally,” he says, “life is the only miracle, and understanding how life works is the most interesting mystery remaining to be solved.”
It’s typically quixotic of Ellison to characterize his philanthropy as a dramatic personal quest to discover a cure for cancer. In an interview with Fortune magazine published in August 2001 (the first in which he drew public attention to his philanthropic activities), Ellison was careful to distinguish between the work of his medical foundation, which is primarily concerned with diseases related to aging, and his investment in the privately held Quark Biotech, a commercial company whose research may revolutionize the treatment of various cancers. But Ellison went on, “Someone asked me once how much I would pay to cure cancer if I could. And I replied, ‘Everything I’ve got.’ What do you think is cooler: being the richest guy on earth or helping find the cure for cancer? What would you want to do? That’s a pretty easy question. Let me nail the Big C.” It left the reader with the rather misleading impression that cancer research was the primary recipient of his philanthropy.
Ellison adds another rider to his definition of philanthropy that he suggests differentiates it from—not coincidentally—the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He argues that the only thing that matters is results—whether any lives are saved. Until you can say that a certain proven lifesaving drug exists only because of research that would not have been funded without your money, it’s best not to say anything at all. Ellison says, “We measure philanthropy and philanthropists with the wrong yardstick. It’s not the size of the investment as measured in dollars contributed; it’s the size of the return as measured in lives saved. That’s what we should measure. What good it is to write a check for $100 million if the money is wasted? It may make you feel good, but you didn’t help anybody. Money and motives grab a lot of attention, but I don’t think you can climb into a person’s soul and understand their motives. The correct measure is how much good you did for how many people: how many lives did you save; how many children did you educate; how many jobs did you provide?”
It’s hard to say how much of this Joshua Lederberg (or deep down, Ellison himself) agrees with. It does, however, provide Ellison with a kind of shield against questions of motive and comparisons between him and Gates, who has undoubtedly committed greater sums of money to medical research than Ellison. For the record, Ellison has committed $250 million to his own foundation since it began in 1998, and he’s made it clear to Lederberg that as the number of sponsored research projects grows, the funding will expand to meet the demand. But it goes deeper than the slightly absurd rivalry with Gates. Ellison can’t bear the idea of being categorized as simply a rich man with a simple desire to do some good in the world. Even his philanthropy has to be judged by rules that don’t apply to others. It also comes back to his suspicion of altruism and the baggage of political correctness that, these days, often accompanies it. “God won’t grant you absolution just because you wrote a few checks,” he says.
Whatever Ellison’s eccentricities as a philanthropist, Lederberg’s influence as chairman of the Ellison Medical Foundation has been powerfully present in setting its goals. Lederberg has a strong sense of how philanthropic funds should be used, in contrast to investment, which expects an economic return, or the aid that governments should give on behalf of taxpayers. For example, if the only concern is a straightforward cost/benefit analysis of the best way to save lives, there’s not much doubt that putting money into better sanitation and clean drinking water in the Third World would be the way to go. But both Lederberg and Ellison believe that such uncontroversial projects, which simply require money and management, are the role of governments and aid agencies rather than individuals, however wealthy. Ellison, who unlike many rich men has no objection to paying higher taxes, says, “Higher taxes don’t bother me at all so long as governments spe
nd the money efficiently on projects that make the world a better, safer place. Unfortunately most government agencies are quite inefficient, so an awful lot of the money they spend is wasted.”
From the outset, Lederberg counseled Ellison against seeing the EMF as a vehicle for waging a personal war against the Big C. He says, “Finding a cure to cancer is not going to happen in any one step. Cancer is a lot of diseases, although there may be conceptual approaches that are shared in a number of areas. I think there will be incremental successes from time to time; however, in twenty years’ time there will still be a lot of cancers, albeit not the same ones that we see today. But the main thing is that cancer is probably the most heavily invested area in biomedicine—it’s actually very hard to find new niches for an investment in cancer. Which isn’t to say that if an idea was presented to us that we were convinced was hot and for some reason wasn’t acceptable to other funding sources, we wouldn’t support it. But we decided against actively soliciting in cancer.” The same was true of AIDS, another illness that doesn’t lack for private sector funds.
The decision was made to focus the EMF on diseases that were related to aging—an oddly unfashionable area of research despite the fact that we are all living longer and increasingly susceptible to such illnesses. Our golden years may turn out to be more of a curse than a blessing, and the cost of caring for the sick elderly is in danger of bankrupting social security systems.
Ellison says, “The longer you live, the more likely it is that you’ll get one of the common diseases of aging: Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s, and so on. But because health care has improved, these diseases no longer kill you right away. That’s the good news. But a longer life span comes at a very high price: higher health care costs and extended periods of human suffering. The only way to avoid paying this price is to find cures for these diseases. Cures are vastly more humane and much more economical than care. Caring for a family member with Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, or Parkinson’s can be financially and emotionally exhausting. Unless we cure these diseases, they’ll devastate our families and destroy our health care system.”5
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