Lawrence J. Ellison, now one of the richest people in America (nearly rivaling Bill Gates), was born in the Bronx, New York in 1944. After he contracted pneumonia at 19 months, his young mother gave him to her great aunt and uncle to raise. He lived in a lower middle-class Jewish ghetto on the South Side of Chicago in a two-bedroom apartment. As a child Ellison showed an aptitude for math and science, which, he says, he liked because he was good at. Later he would be named science student of the year at the University of Illinois.
