After the publication of “Java’s War”, some people asked Ellison if it was true that he was seeking revenge for Jobs. They said that Ellison, the selfish and arrogant madman who picks fights with anyone and everyone, must be doing this for money.
To answer this question, in this article, allow me to gossip about the extravagant life of truly wealthy people.
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It was around 1986, the year when Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and left in solitude. Larry Ellison was sleeping in his home in Woodside, California when a peacock that had wandered into his yard woke him up. He found out that the peacock belonged to his neighbor, Steve Jobs, and went over to complain.
Steve Jobs said: “Ha, you don’t like this bird either. The peacock was a gift from my girlfriend, and I need to figure out a way to get rid of it.”
Two of the most outstanding individuals in the IT industry have begun a 25-year-long intimate friendship.
They went for thousands of walks together. Jobs made Ellison watch the sample footage of “Toy Story” 73 times, insisting on minor improvements, such as adding a bit more light and shadow effects.
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The following picture is the house where Steve Jobs resided for ten years in Woodside, California. It was built in 1925 by mining magnate D. Jackling.
In this house, Steve Jobs experienced unemployment, launched a new business, got married, had a child, and even met Ellison. The house was too old and Steve Jobs’ application to demolish and rebuild it was repeatedly obstructed by people who wanted to protect the old building. Therefore, he was unable to see the reconstruction of the house even until his death.
Ellison listed the neighbor’s old house that holds their memory for sale in the same month of Steve Jobs’ passing, at a price lower by $4 million than what he bought it for.
Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Jobs, has been persistent in applying for the demolition of their old home, and in 2016, construction began on their new home. However, it seems that she has no intention of actually living there, but rather fulfilling Steve Jobs’ wish. She owns several beautiful properties, such as a $60 million mansion on the Malibu beachfront, which was affected by last year’s wildfires.
(The old residence of Steve Jobs, which is under renovation on Google Maps)
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Compared to Steve Jobs’ “inability to enjoy,” Ellison is an unparalleled winner in life. The only thing he has probably not enjoyed in this world is landing on the moon.
The following image shows the luxurious Japanese-style mansion built by Ellison in Woodside, which cost a whopping 200 million dollars just to construct.
The following picture depicts Ellison’s lifelong passion for sailing.
The following image is the Mig-29 fighter jet, of which Ellison himself owns one and personally pilots.
The following picture shows a seventy-year-old Ellison and his young girlfriend Nikita Kahn.
The following image is Oracle Arena, where Ellison often goes: the home stadium of the NBA’s strongest team, the Golden State Warriors.
The following image depicts the 6th largest island owned by Ellison, located in Hawaii.
Let’s reflect on our country’s wealthy people, who should learn to spend their money with a little more taste.
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In 1995, Microsoft released the groundbreaking Windows 95, causing Apple’s complete defeat in the personal computer industry.
Previously, Sony, a household name in the electronics industry, had proposed to the board of directors a plan to acquire Apple through Shunichi Outa, but it was rejected by the chairman who deemed it as having no value.
Ellison and Jobs went for a mountain climb and both of them felt sad about the current state of Apple. Ellison said, “My friend, given the low market value of Apple at present, I will buy it from you and hand it back to you. You can become the CEO again immediately.”
Steve Jobs said, “I just want to come back in another way, to have Apple acquire my company, NeXT, so that my return is more valuable.”
Ellison said: “Brother, if you do this, it will take another two years to talk about it, and when we go back, we won’t have control of Apple, so how can we make money?”
Jobs stopped and put his hands on Ellison’s shoulders: “Larry, this is the reason why I value brotherly love so much. You have too much money, and I don’t need money either. I don’t even plan on taking a salary. I do this because I want to change the world.”
In a speech at USC in 2016, Ellison later mentioned this moment with deep emotion, stating that there are things more important than money.
As we all know, the NeXT operating system developed by Steve Jobs became a crucial foundation for both Mac OS X and iOS for the iPhone. Despite rebuilding Apple’s glory, Jobs himself only took a salary of $1 per year.
The style of the famous Macworld conference hosted every year by Apple was inspired by Steve Jobs’ learning from Ellison’s Openworld. (Later, Tim Cook and Steve Jobs also learned it well.)
After Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he immediately invited Ellison to join the Apple Board of Directors.
Ellison said in his speech, “I think Apple needs to focus less on competing with Microsoft and more on doing something extraordinary: returning to innovation, returning to creativity, and returning to looking towards the future.”
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Although Ellison has been criticized severely by netizens, we must objectively acknowledge that the majority of China’s internet is built on Oracle products (Oracle database, MySQL, Java, and various enterprise-level software).
China’s major banks still manage all of our finances using Oracle in conjunction with DB2. Similarly, most of China’s large enterprises operate securely and reliably using Oracle databases.
These are all the contributions of oracle bone script to the development of the Chinese economy.
Because of a layoff that compensated N+6, cursing on the keyboard with flying spittle, feeling like I didn’t hit the mark.
The suspicion of the open source community towards Oracle prompted them to create MariaDB through a hard fork of MySQL. However, five years after Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL, rather than being maliciously killed off, MySQL has only become stronger.
The market share and heavyweight companies using MySQL are far greater than MariaDB, including Facebook, Github, YouTube, Twitter, PayPal, Nokia, Spotify, Netflix…
Like Steve Jobs, Ellison came from a humble background and did not graduate from college. By the age of 33, he had already held over ten jobs and gone through a divorce because his former spouse considered him to be without ambition.
What kind of driving force pushes him to proactively read IBM’s profound papers on relational databases (as shown in the picture) at his age, and bravely turn it into reality? We should know that even IBM itself had not realized the value of it at the time.
As the unparalleled masters who have driven IT and the internet for forty years, I believe we should first admire Jobs and Ellison before making any evaluations.