Larry Ellison is the CEO and co-founder of the multibillion-dollar software company Oracle. He was listed as the third richest man in America, according to Forbes in 2008. The following feature, written by Michael Warshaw, was published in SUCCESS’s 10th Annual Great Comebacks issue, August 1995.

Abandoned by his unmarried mother as an infant, Lawrence J. Ellison was raised by Russian- Jewish immigrant relatives on Chicago’s South Side. He was a failure as a student, dropping out of the University of Illinois.

In 1965, Ellison moved to California, working as a programmer for the next eight years. Then he went into business with a former boss, Robert Miner, to set up what would become Oracle Systems Corp.

The partners struggled. Ellison had to mortgage his house to obtain a credit line. In 1980, Oracle still had only eight employees and revenues of less than $1 million.

But it did have one asset that would be worth millions. A few years before, Ellison came across a research paper IBM was circulating in the computer industry. It described a pioneering database programming language called SQL.

Big Blue might not have seen the possibilities, but Ellison did. He rewrote the language so that it could be run on any computer. In 1981, when IBM decided to allow all of its products to support SQL, Ellison had his product ready. As IBM pumped out its new PCs, Oracle boomed.

Ellison patterned his style after medieval samurai warriors. He launched a ferocious attack on the database software market, hiring troops of hungry new MBAs. Mercilessly, he attacked competitors’ products and touted Oracle. The company doubled in size year after year, reaching $282 million in 1988.

Driven by its warlord chairman, Oracle made promises it could not keep. It claimed its software supported Digital Equipment Corp.’s VAX platform three years before it actually did. Huge ads trumpeted full compatibility with IBM’s DB 2 database package, a patent falsehood. “Up to 1990, Oracle was fairly notorious for pre-announcing products,” says Paul Cubbage, analyst at Dataquest Inc. In Silicon Valley, it was jeered that Oracle’s product development was an overhead projector.

The thrice-divorced Ellison paid a high price for his damn-the-torpedoes personal style. His company was on the rocks. Employees gossiped about the young women he dated and his reckless driving, relishing the story of how their CEO was caught three days in a row at the same speed trap, refusing to pull over and screaming into the Oracle parking lot with the police in hot pursuit.

Oracle launched Version 6.0, a product so bug infested that clients couldn’t run it. Sales reps began giving away incredible credit deals and booking sales before contracts were signed. “It was a billion-dollar business out of control,” says former Oracle executive Tom Siebel. “Internal information systems were a disaster.”

Third-quarter earnings in March 1990 were 25 percent off expectations. In one of Wall Street’s biggest sell-offs, the share price tumbled to $7.875 overnight. Accounts receivable swelled to almost 50 percent of annual sales. Oracle’s earnings in the next quarter were off by 20 percent.

Then came the big one: In September, Oracle announced a $28.7 million loss, its first ever. From an all-time high of $28.125 in early March, Oracle’s stock price nose-dived to $5.375. The company lost 80 percent of its $3.7 billion market capitalization. The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation for illicit accounting practices. Ellison stayed home, roaming his Japanese-style mansion in Atherton, Calif., thinking his life, as he knew it, was at an end. Then, as he rode his bicycle for miles along the California coast, Ellison asked himself a question: “Am I the right person to fix it?”

He made a decision. He had made the mess. He would clean it up. “After much thought and soul-searching, I was determined to stay,” he recalls. Besides, “I realized it wasn’t obvious who I could be replaced with.”

Ellison fired everyone in sight. Hundreds of lieutenants and executives were canned. Scores of others left what they believed to be a sinking ship.

Ellison and his new management team liquidated accounts receivable, tightened financial controls and introduced a new compensation system that rewarded sales reps only when products actually shipped. In the middle of the process, Ellison took a vacation to Hawaii. While bodysurfing, he took on a 13-foot wave that overwhelmed him and smashed his body into the coral. His lung was punctured, his neck was fractured; but Ellison refused to let this brush with death keep him from bringing Oracle back. The company leapt into the black. Annual revenues for fiscal 1995 are projected at $2.9 billion.

To ensure that Oracle is poised for a video-on-demand future, Ellison has invested an estimated $60 million of his own money to buy a controlling stake of nCube Corp., a Silicon Valley upstart that builds massively parallel supercomputers. By harnessing thousands of microprocessors, each with an individual memory unit, they provide vastly higher processing speeds at lower costs than traditional mainframes or supercomputers. It’s the only way, he insists, to deliver video on demand at a reasonable price. If he owns the technology, he’ll own the future.

More than anything, Ellison is out to show Bill Gates who’s boss. While Microsoft Corp.’s revenues are more than twice Oracle’s, Ellison is widely viewed as the only person in the computer business with the cash—his net worth is about $3 billion—and the vision to challenge Microsoft and become No. 1.