Short answer: Yes. Larry Ellison was born in New York City on August 17, 1944 to Florence Spellman, an unwed 19-year-old Jewish mother, and was adopted at nine months old by her aunt and uncle, Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison, who raised him in a Reform Jewish home in Chicago. He is also a self-declared religious skeptic who refused a bar mitzvah at 13, so his documented Jewish birth and upbringing sit alongside his own stated distance from Jewish religious dogma.
What the record actually shows
- Born August 17, 1944, in the Bronx, New York City, to Florence Spellman, an unwed 19-year-old, with a biological father who was an Italian-American U.S. Army Air Corps pilot, per the Jewish Journal. The Jerusalem Post describes her as "a 19-year-old unwed Jewish mother."
- Adopted at nine months old. After Ellison contracted pneumonia, Spellman placed him with her aunt and uncle, Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison, who adopted him and raised him in Chicago, per the Jewish Journal and The Jewish Chronicle. Biographer Mike Wilson reports he learned he was adopted at 12. He did not meet his birth mother again until he was 48.
- Raised Reform. His adoptive parents kept a Reform Jewish home, according to The Jewish Chronicle. JTA likewise describes him as "raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents." Biographer Mike Wilson reports that at 13 he declined to have a bar mitzvah.
- His own words on Judaism. As carried by The Jewish Chronicle: "While I think I am religious in one sense, the particular dogmas of Judaism are not dogmas I subscribe to." He has described the traditional stories as mythology he respects but does not take as literally true.
- The surname is adoptive. "Ellison" comes from Louis Ellison, his adoptive father and his mother's uncle. It is not his biological father's surname.
- No documented conversion and no documented adult synagogue affiliation. What the record supports is a Jewish birth mother, a Reform childhood, and a personally non-observant, skeptical adult.
Why people ask
Ellison is one of the most visible businessmen alive, and visibility drives the question. Forbes lists him at 82 as chairman and CTO of Oracle, owner of roughly 40 percent of the company, worth $193.6 billion and ranked eighth in the world as of August 27, 2026. The Ellison family took control of Paramount through an $8 billion merger with his son David Ellison's Skydance, completed in August 2025, and he was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on March 25, 2026. The TikTok U.S. joint venture closed on January 22, 2026, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each holding about 15 percent, as Variety and CNBC reported. The Jewish Federations of North America had lobbied for the divest-or-ban law behind it, and JTA reported in October 2025 that Jewish groups hoped Oracle running TikTok would mean tougher rules against antisemitism on the platform.
The adoption is the other reason the question sticks. Because Ellison was raised by relatives who adopted him, and because he refused a bar mitzvah and has said plainly that he does not subscribe to Jewish dogma, casual accounts sometimes treat his background as unclear. The documented facts are not unclear: his birth mother was Jewish, his adoptive parents were Jewish and raised him Reform, and his own skepticism is a statement about belief, not about ancestry. One episode is often misread as something darker. In 1999 he bought a 191-foot superyacht named Izanami, after a Shinto deity. When local papers noted the name spelled "I'm a Nazi" backwards, he renamed it Ronin. In his own telling, reported by JTA: "When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was 'I'm a Nazi' spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat."
Larry Ellison and Israel
Ellison visited Israel in 2007 and has given heavily since, including roughly half a million dollars that year toward a community center in Sderot, reported by The Jerusalem Post as $500,000 and by The Jewish Chronicle as £370,000 to reinforce the building against rocket attacks. On November 6, 2014 he gave $10 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, the largest of the donations the Times of Israel listed, at a Beverly Hills gala that raised a record $33.5 million, and on November 2, 2017 he gave $16.6 million, then the largest single gift in FIDF history, at a gala that raised $53.8 million. Speaking that night he said: "For 2,000 years, we were a stateless people, but now, we have a country we can call our own." Full details in our companion piece Does Larry Ellison Support Israel?.
The bottom line
Yes, Larry Ellison is Jewish. His birth mother was Jewish, and the aunt and uncle who adopted him raised him in a Reform Jewish home. He is also, by his own account, a religious skeptic who turned down a bar mitzvah and does not subscribe to Jewish dogma. Both things are true at once, and the record supports saying exactly that.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
