Oracle CEO Larry Ellison struggles with long-term strategy
The IT Reporter recently spoke with a few Oracle insiders, high-ranking managers close to CEO Larry Ellison, who wish to remain anonymous. We will refer to them as John and Peter in this article.
Struggling with CEO duty
John told us that Larry seemed to have quite a hard time coming up with a proper long-term strategy document for the Oracle corporation. He was frequently seen wandering around restlessy in his office, and responded irritable when board members asked about the document. When he showed up on a stockholders meeting with a bunch of Post-Its taped together, Oracle President Safra Catz pulled him out of the meeting after 10 minutes of laughter, urging him to get it together.
Rock bottom
Peter continues, “That was when Larry really hit rock bottom. I mean, he’s a great guy, but you can’t manage a business like Oracle without a proper vision for the future. We’re all looking at him to show us that vision. Anyway, then one weekend, he sent me this text saying “That’s it, I’m finally gonna nail that stupid strategy doc today!”… so I thought, “Great, he’s pulled himself together!”. That was early Saturday night, and then later, very early Sunday morning, like 5 AM, he sent me another text, saying “Yessss! Got it all right here. I know I screwed up before but I’m telling you, ya’ll gonna love this!”. So I was really happy for him”, Peter said.
Bad luck
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has trouble looking in the future
John went on, in a lower voice. “Yeah, I felt much better too when I heard about that from Peter. But then…”, John sighed for a bit, “… he showed up at the office on Monday, and well Peter and I told a bunch of people that Larry had finally gotten down to writing a proper long-term strategy for Oracle, so there were quite a few people waiting at his doorstep…. but when he arrived… man, you should see his face. He was very pale, and he looked almost like a zombie. So I said, “Larry, good to see you man, let’s see what you got!” but he only mumbled something like “Damn document. Damn kid. Damn laptop. Goddamnit. Fuck!” and smashed the door on us.
Wrong laptop
“Apparently Larry had indeed produced a nice document”, Peter continues, “I called his wife and she confirmed it. He had read it to her in the early morning. He wrote it on his laptop. But guess what, he got his son David exactly the same laptop as his own. David wanted that one too because it’s got 18-carat gold diamonds on it and stuff. So it happened that David had decided to reinstall his laptop from scratch, it was totally infested with viruses and spyware and all that, so he formatted the entire harddisk, with the super-thorough DOD-standard erasing you know.”
John took over, “But he did that on Larry’s laptop instead of his own! And then he installed Ubuntu on it. God, I wish I could have seen Larry’s face when he turned it on!”, John said with a big grin. “So, he totally lost it. Absolutely no way to get it back. Man, what a disaster!”.
Locked up
Mr. Ellison was not available to comment on this article. According to John and Peter, the management team has decided to lock him up in a mountain cabin for a few days, with plenty of paper and pens, and guards at the door. “It’s for his own good”, a press release said. Meanwhile, David reported being very happy with the newly installed laptop.
