Larry Ellison's Speech to Yale Class of 2000

Larry Ellison's Speech to Yale Class of 2000

An email text circulating since June 2000 purports to contain a commencement address given by Oracle's flamboyant CEO, Larry Ellison, to Yale's Class of 2000. Here's a snippet of that alleged speech:

As I look out before me today, I don't see a thousand hopes for a bright tomorrow. I don't see a thousand future leaders in a thousand industries. I see a thousand losers.

What can you expect? Loser. Loserhood. Loser cum laude....

The speech goes on in that vein before closing abruptly with Ellison chiding the bodyguards who are supposedly dragging him off the stage.

Is this true? It's truly funny, but it's not factual.

Larry Ellison was not at Yale University's graduation ceremony in May 2000. There was no guest speaker there in fact. There was a keynote speaker, however, and that was journalist Bob Woodward, who graduated from Yale in 1965, and is now well known for his Watergate Scandal reporting for the Washington Post. And not even he said any of the things in the missive above.

The material in question is simply a funny that made its first appearance on the SatireWire Website.

A friend of a friend of somebody's friend, and possibly several such somebodies, then copied and pasted the text from the SatireWire web page into email, without providing proper attribution as to either the article's copyrighted source, or its author, Andrew Marlatt. But it's out there in suggestive email forwards for all the world to guffaw at and ask about, from now until kingdom come.

These things just happen.

– Peter Kohler