Larry Ellison's Speech to Yale Class of 2000
Netlore Archive: Did flamboyant Oracle CEO Larry Ellison really deliver a commencement address in which he called Yale graduates 'a pack of losers'?
Description: Email hoax / Satire
Circulating since: June 2000
Status: Falsely attributed to Larry Ellison
Example:
Excerpt from email text circulating in June 2000:
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Graduates of Yale University, I apologize if you have endured this type of prologue before, but I want you to do something for me. Please, take a good look around you. Look at the classmate on your left. Look at the classmate on your right. Now, consider this: five years from now, 10 years from now, even 30 thirty years from now, odds are the person on your left is going to be a loser. The person on your right, meanwhile, will also be a loser. And you, in the middle? What can you expect? Loser. Loserhood. Loser Cum Laude. In fact, 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. |
Analysis by Peter Kohler: The quoted 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.
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Further reading:
Ellison to Grads: Diplomas Are for Losers
Full text of the original satirical piece by Andrew MarlattThe Vonnegut MIT Commencement Address
Another commencement speech that never was (and the inspiration for the hit "Sunscreen Song").
Last updated 12/09/10
