Larry Ellison Quotes
302 Larry Ellison Quotes
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[On Steve Jobs and his involvement with the Apple Store and Toy Story.] On too many weekends, when he wasn’t making me watch new scenes from Toy Story, he made me go to the warehouse and look at the mockups for the store. He was obsessed by every detail of the aesthetic and the service experience. It got to the point where I said, ‘Steve I’m not coming to see you if you’re going to make me go to the store again.’
Larry Ellison
[On Steve Jobs and the Apple Store] If you look at the stores and the products, you will see Steve’s obsession with beauty as simplicity – this Bauhaus aesthetic and wonderful minimalism, which goes all the way to the checkout process in the stores. It means the absolute minimum number of steps. Steve gave us the exact, explicit recipe for how he wanted the checkout to work.
Larry Ellison
Don’t tell us how you’ve been running your business… It’s a classic business mistake to say, ‘This is how we do business; change your software so we can automate it.’
Larry Ellison
Why do people use heavily customized, one-of-a-kind business systems? Because they had no other choice.
Larry Ellison
Most companies spend too much [on information technology] and get very little return.
Larry Ellison
We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing.
Larry Ellison
[In April 2002] You can only understand Web services if you’ve been in the fashion industry. Web services are fashionable, just as pink might be this year’s fashionable color.
Larry Ellison
[In October 1999] We do want to sell to business people as opposed to IT people. We think it is a little bit strange that business people aren’t involved in this stuff.
Larry Ellison
[In October 1999] The business people are the ones who should understand what we are selling and the ones who should make that decision to buy or not buy.
Larry Ellison
[In February 2004 on the irony of a global database of financial records versus medical records.] If I get hit by a bus here in San Diego, they will know I can pay [the hospital bill], but they won’t know my blood type because that is stored in paper files on a shelf in my doctor’s office in Palo Alto.
Larry Ellison
People get on airplanes all over the world and fly to the United States to get health care. And we have an educational system that would be an embarrassment to a third world country.
Larry Ellison
Health care is not a government monopoly. Education is.
Larry Ellison
I don’t think you revamp the entire health care system, which delivers incredible quality health care, the best health care in the world, you don’t revamp that system of private-public cooperation that exists right now and turn it into a public monopoly.
Larry Ellison
Did I anticipate being the fifth-wealthiest person in the United States in 1996? No. I mean, this is all kind of surreal. I don’t even believe it now. Not only did I not believe it when I was fourteen, but when I look around, I say, this must be something out of a dream.
Larry Ellison
My favorite color happens to be green, but not because it’s the color of money.
Larry Ellison
If I pick up another billion this coming year, it has no meaning in terms of being able to buy something that I wanted that I couldn’t buy last year. It doesn’t change my life in any way.
Larry Ellison
[On buying a used Mercedes in 1976 and getting married again.] We were chatting away, and finally this woman says, ‘You know, I have the perfect girl for you.’ I’m thinking. This is a really bad idea. Normally with a used car a woman doesn’t come along with it. I said, ‘That’s interesting, that’s nice.’ I was being polite. She said, ‘Charlie’ or whatever her husband’s name was – ‘don’t you think Nancy would be perfect for Larry?’ Charlie said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ She said, ‘Don’t you think Nancy’s the best-looking girl you’ve ever seen in your life?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s probably true.’ Now I’m paying a lot of attention. [He got her phone number – Nancy Elizabeth Wheeler and did buy the car.] We met for lunch and started dating. She was very funny, very smart, very athletic, very outgoing, and very sheltered. We got married rather quickly.
Larry Ellison
We’d sell anything anyone wanted to buy. So if they wanted it on this platform, we said, ‘Fine, we’ll move it to that platform.’ It became very clear that there was no dominant mini-computer platform, and we were a database for minicomputers at that time. There were several operating systems and computers, and we had to survive. We had to make sure that our product ran in a variety of environments. The only way we could do that was to make it portable.
Larry Ellison
[On Oracle Software] Promiscuous [because it would work] With anybody.
Larry Ellison
Mea culpa.
Larry Ellison
It is not enough to succeed; everyone else must fail.
It's not sufficient I succeed. Everyone else must fail.
Larry Ellison
How much does it cost Pepsi to get one half of one percent of the market from Coke once the market has been established? It’s very expensive. This market is being established. If we don’t run as hard as we can as fast as we can, and then do it again twice as fast, it’ll be cost-prohibitive for us to increase market share.
Larry Ellison
You know, all the competitors are doing the same thing, and if I don’t do it, somebody else will.
Larry Ellison
I cannot run this business and tell the truth to customers. It’s not possible.
Larry Ellison
[On vaporware.] In the early days we did not scrupulously make clear what was in the design spec and the language spec and what was actually in the current version of the product. Someone once jokingly said that in 1992 we actually finished the implementation of the 1977 brochure.
Larry Ellison
[In January 1983 on the birth of his son David.] This is so cool!
Larry Ellison
[On a pre-nuptial agreement with his second wife.] I don’t want to get into disputes between me and Barbara [Boothe] which will affect the kids. I think it’s completely inappropriate for me to attack the mother of my children in any way. If that means I’m not going to answer or defend this at all, then I’ll have to live with that.
Larry Ellison
I’m paying for a litigation department. Let’em litigate!
Larry Ellison
[On the possibility of him having his margin loan on Oracle stock called in, in the fall of 1990] There was a possibility of losing absolutely everything I had. [On how it felt.] It’s exciting. It’s a rush, man.
Larry Ellison
[In December 1990 arranging a line of credit with Morgan Stanley.] Morgan Stanley came to my rescue. Morgan Stanley said, ‘We think you’re bankable… Tell me how much you need.’ Well, that’s kind of an extreme statement. If I had said, ‘Twenty-five billion dollars,’ they would have said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no. You need to need less.’ But Morgan Stanley expressed confidence that I still had enough equity in Oracle stock to continue to be worthy of credit.
Larry Ellison
You idiots. Do what you want. I know I’m right. I’ve spoken my piece.
Larry Ellison
[After his surfing accident.] It had been a very bad year.
Larry Ellison
If you want schedules, I’ll give you schedules.
Larry Ellison
The worst thing that happened to me was just going up and down the elevators. I remember the way one woman looked at me in an elevator… There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say.
Larry Ellison
The interesting thing about this technology, what you see here, is that it will run on a four or five hundred dollar Internet terminal.
Larry Ellison
The PC is a ridiculous device. The idea is so complicated and so expensive. People in the PC world make fun of the mainframe. They say it’s much too complicated and much too expensive, and therefore it has to die. You can make the same statement about the PC. [On network computers.] These appliances will cost four to five hundred dollars and give you video and audio. And if they break, unplug it and throw it away.
Larry Ellison
Life is the enlightened pursuit of happiness, not the unenlightened pursuit of as much money as you can accumulate. And the only things that are important in our lives are love and work – not necessarily in that order, but they’re both important.
Larry Ellison
We work because work is an act of creation. We identify with it… I look at the company and I think, ‘This is me.’ But that’s not my whole life.
Larry Ellison
People I care about, people I love, are essential for my sanity to make it through every day. So both of those things, work and love, conspire to deliver some kind of happiness. And if we get reasonably good at both of them, we’re in really great shape.
Larry Ellison
[On his house with a wall of windows in the living room that was forty-four feet wide and thirteen feet high.] When you walk in, the view just assaults you.
Larry Ellison
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