# The Lanai Purchase *A Biography of Larry Ellison* — Legendary Biographies No. 026 - **Subject:** Lawrence Joseph Ellison - **Written by:** Sterling Aldridge - **Shelf:** Technology & Money / Technology - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 205 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 205 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-061-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-206-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/026-the-lanai-purchase.html ## About this book He was born in 1944 to a teenage mother in the Bronx, raised by an aunt and uncle on Chicago's South Side, dropped out of two universities, drifted to California in his early twenties, and founded Software Development Laboratories in 1977 with $1,200 of his own money. Forty-five years later, Oracle is worth half a trillion dollars and Lawrence Joseph Ellison personally owns 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Sterling Aldridge's biography follows the arc with the same procedural rigour Aldridge brought to his Bloomberg Businessweek work on Silicon Valley founders. The book traces the early IBM-relational-database years, the 1986 Oracle IPO, the 1990 near-collapse and Ray Lane turnaround, the PeopleSoft acquisition fight, the Sun Microsystems purchase, the long rivalry with Bill Gates, the 2014 transition from CEO to chairman/CTO, and the 2012 Lanai purchase for an estimated $300 million. What emerges is a portrait of a database-software founder whose company's products you have probably never seen and whose products run more of the world's commerce than the work of any other living person. ## Contents 1. The Bronx, 1944 2. California and the Code 3. The CIA and the First Contract 4. The Database Wars 5. The Reckoning 6. The Rivals 7. The Five Wives 8. The Japanese Garden 9. The Island 10. The Cup 11. The Hostile Takeovers 12. The Cloud War 13. The Fortune 14. The Tesla Seat 15. The Media Kingdom 16. Stargate 17. The Mother 18. Power as the Subject ## Questions **Who is The Lanai Purchase about?** Lawrence Joseph Ellison. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Lanai Purchase — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,589 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 205 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Sterling Aldridge is an Atlanta-based business journalist whose work for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal has focused on the founders, fraudsters, and venture capitalists of the late-stage tech industry. After years of reporting on the ground, he transitioned to writing book-length portraits of industry figureheads. His biographies, including Satoshi, On the Run, and The Monopolist, examine the human cost of rapid technological scale. Other works like The Encino Hills, The Lanai Purchase, and The Five-Day Firing focus on the high-stakes boardroom battles that define modern Silicon Valley. He has also authored The Black Turtleneck and The Glen Park Library. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spends his free time restoring midcentury modern furniture and cycling through the city's historic neighborhoods.