Adda Quinn

Adda Quinn is an American businessperson. She is the first wife of Oracle founder, Lawrence Ellison.

Quinn met Ellison, "the most charismatic man I had ever met," as she described him, at a Berkeley employment agency in 1967. Ellison was 22, five months older than Quinn. They began dating and married shortly after. 

The couple lived in a one–room apartment for three years before buying a house in Oakland in 1970. In the early 1970s, the couple went through frequent financial troubles. Ellison's extravagant hobbies and aimlessness frustrated Quinn and the two began seeing a marriage counselor. In one of the sessions Ellison expressed his desire to become a millionaire. Unconvinced and unimpressed, Quinn advised him to go make his million for his own sake, and decided to leave the marriage. They divorced in 1974.

At the time, Ellison was working with Ampex (founded by engineering pioneer, Alexander M. Poniatoff,) where he became influenced by Edgar F. Codd's research on relational database design, which led in 1977 to the formation of his own database company. 

After the divorce, Quinn joined the Environmental Division of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto as their Business Manager. After working as the Business Manager for 10 years, she became the Project Manager in the Land and Water Quality Program at EPRI.

Looking back, in the book, Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle, Ellison says of Quinn: 

Adda was very bright and exceptionally pretty. Our problems stemmed from the fact that, unlike me, she took life seriously and worked hard at it. She’d get home from her full-time job, make a gourmet dinner, clean up, and then start to wallpaper one of the bedrooms in our house. She wanted me to help her. Perfectly reasonable request, but I didn’t want to wallpaper the bedroom. I wanted to go for a bike ride. I didn’t want a full-time job either, so I did just enough contract programming to pay my part of the monthly bills. Most of my time was spent backpacking in Yosemite and kayaking in the Sierras.

Quinn married her second husband, George Sublett, in 1990. Sublett had two sons from his previous marriage. Quinn and Sublett had interest in horse-riding and rode extensively. The two remained married until Sublett's death in 2010 –– Sublett had a bad fall from a horse which resulted in brain damage and a stroke, resulting in his death in 2010.

Second marriage

Ellision married his second wife, Nancy Wheeler Jenkins in 1977 –– just six months before he founded his first company, Software Development Laboratories (SDL.) The marriage lasted only a year and they divorced in 1978, with Wheeler giving up any claim on her husband's company for $500.

Third marriage

In 1979, Ellison renamed "Software Development Laboratories" to "Relational Software Inc." and in 1982, he renamed it to Oracle. A year later, in 1983, he married his third wife, Barbara Boothe, who was a former receptionist at Relational Software Inc. His third marriage also ended in a divorce in 1986 –– the couple had two children, David Ellison and Megan Ellison, who are film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively.

Fourth marriage

In December 2003, Ellison married romance novelist, Melanie Craft. Ellison's friend Steve Jobs, (founder of Apple Inc.,) was the official wedding photographer and the wedding was officiated by then-California Representative, Tom Lantos. His fourth marriage also ended in a divorce, in 2010.