Perhaps as a result, Ellison’s first foray into political activism was working for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Ellison’s political heroes are all of the “man of destiny” type—Winston Churchill, Napoleon, Douglas MacArthur—and, like them, Kennedy was a contradictory character, tough but complex. Ellison says of Churchill and MacArthur, “They had great intellectual and moral integrity. They had the courage to do what they believed to be right rather than what was popular or politically expedient at the time. I admire people with the strength to take a stand against the majority, when they believe the majority is wrong. Churchill took a strong stand against Hitler in the mid-1930s, and he was ridiculed and ostracized from his own party for doing so. But he did it anyway. That’s courage. That’s integrity. I admire risk takers. I like leaders: people who do things before they become fashionable or popular. I find that kind of integrity is inspirational.”9
After Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968, Ellison’s interest in politics waned—“I kind of gave up after they shot Bobby. I just didn’t care anymore. There was nobody left that I liked.”10 It was Ellison’s growing business success in the late 1980s that helped to reengage him. As a wealthy individual who was making his money in the glamorous world of high tech, Ellison was a perfect target for fund-raisers. However, few of the politicians who approached him for money made any impact on him.
Al Gore, with his carefully cultivated contacts in the tech business and high-profile support for the Internet, might have seemed a natural home for some of Ellison’s money. But Ellison despised Gore. After buying the parallel processing computer firm nCUBE, Ellison went to see then Senator Gore to complain about the preferential treatment that a rival, Thinking Machines, seemed to be getting. Not only was Thinking Machines winning government contracts at nCUBE’s expense, but it was also being directly supported with tax dollars that Gore had been instrumental in steering its way. Ellison says that when he complained to Gore about this double whammy, the future vice president smiled and said to him, “What you’ve got to understand, Larry, is that Thinking Machines has been very good to me.” Ellison exploded. “What do you mean, they’ve been good to you? Just how good have they been, Senator? What units of goodness are we talking about here?” Ellison says simply, “I guess he just wanted me to offer him a campaign contribution similar to the one he was getting from Thinking Machines, but back then I didn’t know how the game was played, so I just kind of lost it.”11
Ellison met plenty of other pols but says, “I was profoundly unimpressed by nearly all of them.” Until Bill Clinton. “I met him when he was governor of Arkansas. We spent a few hours together discussing a variety of issues. He’s incredibly smart and just plain interesting. I ended up being the second largest contributor to his first presidential campaign in 1992. I gave him about half a million dollars. That was before he picked Gore as his vice president. After that I didn’t contribute a dime.”12
It’s curious that he was so drawn to someone whom many people would consider the very antithesis of Ellison’s heroes—an infinitely flexible political pragmatist rather than a man of unbending principle and conviction. Nor did Clinton when in office pursue the kind of agenda that Ellison particularly supported: his halfhearted use of American military power; his tedious political correctness on issues such as recruiting homosexuals to the military; his being in thrall to his ideological wife over her disastrous attempt to reform health care; and his lack of conviction on the subject closest to Ellison’s heart—the appalling state of the nation’s secondary schools—because of his timidity in the face of the teachers’ unions.13
The most probable explanation is that Ellison, like many other people, was bowled over by Clinton’s extraordinary charisma and his intellectual quickness. Ellison doesn’t demur: “I just like the guy. He is so interesting: brilliant, complex, ambitious, troubled, talented. I’ve never met anyone quite like him. Nobody loves being alive more than Bill Clinton. And you can’t help feeling the same passion for life when you’re with him. Melanie and I had an unforgettable time jazz-clubbing with him in New Orleans. The man heightens your senses and teaches you what it means to be alive.”
Roughly the same age, both illegitimate, both extremely successful, both risk takers in their professional and personal lives, and both a little bit in love with their own wit and intelligence, it’s not surprising that the two men hit it off and have remained good friends. Nonetheless, Clinton in office was a disappointment to Ellison.
Ellison’s anger about the quality of secondary education may have been influenced by his own experience at school. As an employer of some forty thousand people, a good many of them not only superbright but also the products of the education systems of much poorer countries, Ellison knows something about American secondary education. As he puts it, whatever the failings of America’s health care system (mainly that it costs a lot and is socially divisive), people still get on planes to come and get treated in America, but it’s a long time since he’s heard of anybody coming because of the excellence of America’s publicly funded high schools.
He’s most incensed by the nexus between the teaching unions and the Democratic Party—“The teachers’ union is one of the anchor tenants of the party,” he grumbles—and the obstacle that places in the path of worthwhile reform. He’s particularly fond of the idea of education vouchers to give some economic clout to poor families. He says, “The California public schools are a disgrace. Too many poor minority children are condemned to go to schools that fail to teach. African-American and Hispanic children should have a choice of schools. Any mechanism that gives them that choice—magnet schools, open enrollment, vouchers—I’m for. I’m prochoice on schools.”14
If he ran for the governorship, he would concentrate on introducing vouchers, improving health care, and “keeping the lights on.” He says, “California is a huge economy, and there’s plenty of money available to solve our educational and health care problems if we can get rid of some of the unconscionable waste. Apart from that, I’d concentrate on not doing anything monumentally stupid like losing billions speculating in the energy market. I’m a pretty good problem solver, so I might be a good governor.” Another thing he points out as being in his favor is that no special-interest group could buy him.15
How serious is he? He’s definitely drawn to the idea of running and the opportunity it would give him to put issues that he cares about on the agenda. And compared with the well-named Gray Davis or his equally drab Republican rival in 2002, Bill Simon, Ellison would have presence and charisma to burn. But Ellison’s flamboyance may also have made him too many enemies in business to survive a tough campaign against embattled party machines. And there’s no escaping the fact that he has enough personal history to give a prurient press a field day. Is that what he really needs?
Ellison says that it all depends on how fed up people are with the traditional politicians by the time he’s ready to run—fed up with their incompetence, their pandering to special-interest groups, their “news-speak,” and their dreary political correctness. If Jesse Ventura can make it, he says, why not Larry Ellison? But Ventura could more easily present himself as being on the side of the little guy than California’s wealthiest citizen can. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that if Ellison does decide to run, it won’t be dull.
• • •
What’s also certain is that Ellison wants to stay busy. One thing that he is acutely conscious of, despite rumors to the contrary, is his own mortality. “Life is the only miracle,” he often says. With sixty fast approaching, he thinks increasingly about how to extract the most from what is left to him: “I don’t waste a lot of time. I work intensely on things I care about, and I spend my time with people that I care about. I do what I want to with my time, because I know there’s not much of it left.”
Some of this urgency may be the consequence of Ellison’s lack of any religious belief. Although he was brought up in Reform Judaism, his fam
ily was not particularly religious and the teachings at Hebrew school never stuck. The closest that Ellison is prepared to get to God or anything that might be termed spiritual is nature: a sunrise in Yosemite Valley or the cherry blossoms blowing in the wind at sunset in Kyoto. “That is where I find God,” he says, “in this glorious accident of being alive.”
What may also have concentrated Ellison’s mind on the fragile glory of life are his still recent brushes with death. Although he has never had any serious illness, he nearly killed himself twice in 1992—when he broke his neck while bodysurfing in Hawaii and, soon after, smashed himself up in a serious bicycle accident. Careering down a mountain in Napa, he managed to stick the front wheel of his bike into a section of disused railroad track. The impact as he hit the ground was traumatic, smashing his arm in twenty-eight places and blowing the bone through the skin. It took four operations to rebuild the arm, using bone from Ellison’s hip, and more than two years of rehab in the gym, where he trained with Joe Montana, before he regained his strength. Typically, Ellison boasts that at the end of this period he managed to beat a champion triathlete at dips (although he does admit that the lighter triathlete was handicapped by wearing a thirty-five-pound weight vest).16
If the feelings of power and well-being that come from physical fitness are a critical part of “the glory of being alive” for Ellison, so too is constant mental stimulation. He says, “As long as you’re learning, as long as you’re solving problems, as long as you are working with your mind, then you’re alive. Problems intrigue, excite, and energize me.”
Although Ellison jokes about his dislike of drinking alcohol, saying that it makes him even more unbearably over the top than he already is, the real reason is that he has what amounts almost to a terror of anything that might interfere with the working of his brain. He says, “I can’t stand anything that clouds my mind. I couldn’t take the painkiller they prescribed for me when I was in the hospital with my arm broken in twenty-eight places. I took Tylenol instead. I’d rather deal with the pain than lose my mind to the medication. I have no problem with people drinking; I have no problem with other people smoking dope. If that’s what they want to do, God bless them, that’s their business. But I can’t do those things.”
Ellison, I think, will find coping with the debilities of old age even more difficult than most of us will. What would he prefer, I wondered, a relatively shorter life and going out with a bang or dealing with the feebleness of advanced age? “Would I rather die at eighty or be feeble between eighty and ninety? I’ll take feeble if that’s okay with you. I’d never accept being feeble, though. I’d work out by competing in walker races against the seventy-year-olds.” He admitted that much of what the medical foundation was working on are ways to help people live the last years of their life “in a healthy and robust fashion.”
In the absence of any near-term breakthroughs from the EMF, I couldn’t help asking Ellison whether he was taking anything to help him stay youthful. The answer was disappointingly prosaic: just a few over-the-counter dietary supplements available for a few dollars, such as DHEA (a steroidal precursor that encourages the production of testosterone in older men) and melatonin (a natural sleep enhancer that compensates for the declining efficiency of the pituitary gland). So no fountain of youth and (hand on heart) no cosmetic surgery since his broken nose was fixed nearly thirty years ago.
If Ellison was so certain that there was no life after death, was he, like many rich men, trying to secure a kind of immortality with his money? “Well,” he said, “I hope my children will be proud of me after I’ve gone. But I think it’s a big mistake for people to die very wealthy and leave it to their spouse or their children to give their money away. Why should they have all the fun? I want to give it away myself and see some of the results before I die.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Steve Jobs believes that for all his emotional difficulties in dealing with the deaths of others, Ellison has succeeded in coming to terms with his own mortality. Jobs says, “What makes some people very effective in the way they use the time left to them is that they frequently remember that they’re going to die soon. A lot of people get to the end of their lives and only then realize that they’re going to die and that they should have made a lot of decisions differently. Larry thinks about death often, and I think a person like that has a much better chance of growing old gracefully.”
I think that one day Ellison will be able to disengage from Oracle, but as long as he thinks Oracle needs him, it will continue to have a prior claim over anything else. However, assuming he does create a few degrees of separation between himself and Oracle, he will plunge more deeply into those other areas of interest. He probably won’t find the cure for cancer—as Josh Lederberg says, that’s going to be a long haul—but through his medical foundation, Quark, and his proposed “Rockefeller West” research university, he has a wonderful opportunity to have fun and do a lot of good at the same time. But he should forget about the politics. Even in winning he would be bound to fail. If you’re Larry Ellison, why choose to be unhappy?
* * *
1. LE writes: I was attending a weekend seminar on the Human Genome Project at Stanford. When it was Josh’s turn to talk, he used his first five or ten minutes to summarize and integrate the ideas of the speakers who had preceded him. The crystalline clarity and lyric eloquence of his speech were mesmerizing. I had never experienced anything like it. I wasn’t alone. Paul Berg (Nobel laureate and father of molecular engineering) told me the same thing happened to him when he talked to Josh.
2. LE writes: Josh is the very smartest person I know. Josh invented computer artificial intelligence just because he needed a tool to solve the structure of large organic molecules. He just dropped by the computer science department and invented AI. Unbelievable. Who else does stuff like that? Of course, Isaac Newton invented the calculus because he needed a tool to solve a few physics problems he was working on. But Newton did most of his work in England, so I never met him.
3. LE writes: When capitalism is tempered by democracy there is the hope of combining prosperity with humanity.
4. LE writes: I learned a lot by working in Josh’s lab. And I had a great time. During lunch breaks a bunch of the postdocs and I would go out and play basketball in the park. It was the perfect way to spend my fiftieth birthday.
5. LE writes: Several years ago, I gave a commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University called “Care Less and Cure More.” It was my attempt to highlight the high cost of caring for, rather than curing, society’s most pressing problems. Diseases of aging affect one segment of our population, while illiteracy affects another. Caring for people who are illiterate is much more expensive than teaching them to read and write. Curing our problems upstream is always better than caring for them downstream.
6. LE writes: At this point in my career, I think I should spend most of my time making money, while the foundation figures out how best to spend it. When I leave Oracle, I’ll be able to devote much more of my time to working with the foundation. I’m looking forward to it.
7. LE writes: I’ve pretty much given up on this idea. Interdepartmental co-operation within a university is near impossible.
8. LE writes: I’ve now decided to give one hundred percent of the patent property to the researcher. It’s much simpler that way.
9. LE writes: There are inspirational leaders in all walks of life. Johnny Cash, for example, wrote songs and did concerts supporting Native American causes long before it became fashionable or popular to do so. He was way out in front of everybody else. These days most artists will do concerts to raise money for good causes. I think that’s great, but it’s not the same.
10. LE writes: I didn’t really re-engage in politics until I met Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor who is a member of Congress. Tom and his brilliant wife, Annette, restored my hope in the potential of human beings to govern themselves.
11. LE writes: Now I know how the game is played, but I d
on’t want to play it. We need some kind of campaign finance reform that doesn’t clash with the Constitution. Not an easy problem to solve, though.
12. LE writes: Needless to say, I didn’t support Gore for president. Thank God for the butterfly ballot.
13. LE writes: All true, but you have to give President Clinton credit for NAFTA. He stood against his own party and the unions to create a more prosperous Mexico on our border. That’s Bill Clinton’s profile in courage in my book.
14. LE writes: I do not favor giving school vouchers to the rich. Only poor families need vouchers, and then only when their local school is failing.
15. LE writes: My family has threatened to stop talking to me if I run for office. If I don’t run I’ll probably support Arnie [Schwarzenegger], but only if he invites me to the opening of Terminator 3.
16. LE writes: When I told Joe that my elbow injury was worse than his, he said, “True, but you don’t earn your living with your arm.”
23
“A SCRAP OF INFORMATION”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Larry Ellison was up before dawn, getting ready to do some work on his e-mails, when one of his household staff burst into his study. “Mr. Ellison, turn on the TV right away. An airplane just hit the World Trade Center in New York.” He was just in time to see United Airlines Flight 175 smash into the South Tower. As he watched the unfolding horror, two thoughts crowded his mind: how to keep the businesses running for the many Oracle customers based in the Twin Towers, and whether there had been any Oracle people in the buildings.
That morning Oracle lost eight employees. Six were consultants working with clients in the Towers, and two were among the many heroes created on that awful day. One who had some emergency medical training had gone inside one of the towers to see if he could help the injured. He was never seen again. Finally, there was Todd Beamer, a thirty-two-year-old account executive on his way home to San Francisco on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark. It is Beamer who appears to have led the fight against the terrorists on the doomed plane that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
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