Ellison Pulls Plug on $115 Million Gift

Just days before University President Lawrence H. Summers steps down after losing the confidence of professors, Oracle CEO Lawrence J. Ellison announced that he has lost trust in Harvard University and will not carry through on a pledge made one year ago to donate $115 million dollars to create an institute to study global health initiatives.

The donation would have been the largest in Harvard’s history, but Ellison said Tuesday that with Summers gone, he has lost faith in the University to properly administer the funds.

"The reason I didn't finish my gift to Harvard was because of the way Larry Summers suddenly left Harvard. I lost confidence that that money would be well spent," Ellison said, according to the Daily Telegraph of Britain.

Although Ellison told the Wall Street Journal in June 2005 that the donation was "absolutely going to happen," Oracle spokesman Bob Wynne was quoted by the Bloomberg news agency Tuesday as saying, "There was never a formal agreement between Larry Summers and Larry Ellison...It was a discussion."

Today's announcement was not unexpected–a number of news sources have reported in recent weeks that the nascent Ellison Institute for World Health at Harvard recently laid off three managers.

The managers had previously been hired to guide the growth of the planned institute, which was eventually expected to employ more than 100, and their firing caused rampant speculation that the money would never make it into Harvard's coffers.

Summers declined to comment on Ellison's decision, according to his spokesman, John D. Longbrake.

Ellison–whose total net worth is approximately $16 billion and is the 15th richest person in the world, according to Forbes–also announced this week that he will donate $100 million dollars to the Ellison Medical Foundation. That donation was part of an unusual settlement to an insider-trading lawsuit filed by Oracle shareholders after Ellison made $900 million through selling Oracle stock just before its price fell.

That donation is unrelated to the $115 million donation originally intended for Harvard, and Ellison will announce a major gift to another institution in the next few weeks, Oracle spokespeople told Bloomberg.

In 2001, when Ellison began discussing his plans for a major donation of more than $100 million dollars, he told the Wall Street Journal that the donation would go to either Harvard or Stanford University.

—Material from the Associated Press was used in the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.