One High Roller

In case you missed it, the America's Cup is coming back to the USA.  BMW/Oracle won the last race Sunday against Switzerland's Alinghi.  What's equally great is that the San Francisco Yacht Club co-sponsored BMW Oracle.  This means the next Cup race in three years from now could take place in the San Francisco Bay area, just a hop, a couple of skips and a large jump from Cowtown.

Oracle (software manufacturing) is owned by Larry Ellison who contributed a major portion of the 400 million US dollars to build a Cup boat.  Ellison also owns Sun, another software/hardware company.  He's worth 27 billion US and the fourth richest man in the world.  While it took a lot of bacon to build the Cup boat, this guy has a lot of bacon in the bank.  Larry Ellison is one high roller.

During the Cup campaign in Spain Larry camped out in his 453 foot yacht seen here, the Rising Sun.  It's the 6th largest yacht in the world and was built at a cost of 200 million US.

Ellison is a self man made who was raised by an adoptive family in Chicago.   Never knew his birth mom or dad.  Didn't have that silver spoon gift of wealth to start out with but just was in the right place, the right time, with the right brains and capitalized on the rapid growth of technology to make his fortune. 

What's also amazing is that Larry has three ex-wives and still managed to come out on top.  Guess they didn't get half of everything.  Ya gotta love those pre-nups. 

Whatta dude.