How Trump could make Larry Ellison the next media mogul
He spent up to $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal. He spent up to $200 million on a Japanese-inspired Imperial Villa near Palo Alto in California, bought the sixth largest Hawaiian island, and married, divorced, and dated with unending zeal. Ellison himself was not always present. He didn’t show up to give his keynote speech at Oracle’s annual conference in San Francisco, in 2013, because he was sailing his yacht in order to win the America’s Cup. He won. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”
With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. In 2022, he broke a Florida property record by purchasing a 22-acre estate in Palm Beach. However, at $173 million the price was only a tenth of one percent of his fortune. In 2022, Ellison bought a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach for $173 million, which was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He said that it would be “lots of fun” at the time. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.
Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump and top White House officials met to discuss a change in ownership for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.
Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. Oracle agreed to store the data of U.S. app users in its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5% of TikTok Global, a new company. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.
Five years later, a lot has changed, starting with this: The tech moguls have been unleashed.
Mr. Musk, backed up by President Trump has blurred the lines between private and public. He is blowing government agencies up and using his wealth to try to influence elections. Mr. Ellison is closer to Mr. Trump that any other mogul, including Mr. Musk. He appears to want to bring the nation under the benevolent influence of artificial intelligence. Several, though, might.
Mr. Ellison is contributing the majority of the $8 billion bid made by his son David to buy Paramount. Paramount owns the legendary Hollywood studio, CBS, MTV, and other properties which generate news and content. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval. TikTok is a platform that focuses on producing content. It has 1.5 billion monthly active users, with about a 10th of those in the United States. Mr. Ellison made a big splash at the White House in January when he announced a project called Stargate that will build data centres for artificial intelligence. President Trump was asked whether Mr. Musk would buy TikTok. He responded, “I’d also like Larry to purchase it.” In any case, Mr. Ellison is looking to the future. In 1997, he told Vanity Fair that “the only way I can make myself feel better is by making the world better.” He added: “Don’t confuse this with altruism. It’s egotism. Call it enlightened self-interest.” Ellison is trying to improve the world by pushing for a society of surveillance. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by A.I.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he told Oracle investors last fall. “It’s unimpeachable.”
Also on Mr. Ellison’s to-do list is combining thousands of databases into one enormous electronic repository, which can be mined by A.I. Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister, said that this would cure diseases and fix all other problems. He spoke at a symposium in Dubai on reinventing government in February. Ellison’s quest for data has hit setbacks. Oracle agreed to pay $115 million without admitting wrongdoing. Oracle agreed to pay $115 million without admitting wrongdoing.
During Mr. Ellison’s flamboyant heyday in the 1990s, he provided a striking contrast to what was then a relatively sober Silicon Valley. He called his office style “management by ridicule” and explained that Oracle was run by adolescents after a near-death incident. He told reporters that he would launch a proxy battle to gain control of Apple. He indulged in a long-running, if one-sided, feud with Microsoft.
And then there were his wives and girlfriends. “As a veteran of three marriages, do you feel you can do it better this time?” Playboy asked him in 2002.
“There’s no question I can do it better,” Mr. Ellison replied. “Can I make it worse?” I don’t believe so.”
In 2002, he married Melanie Craft a romance writer who became his wife No. 4. Steve Jobs was the photographer at the wedding. Ms. Craft wrote “Man Trouble,” about a reporter who persuades a romance novelist to help him snag an interview with a shy billionaire.
Mr. Ellison’s dream politician was a Democrat in those days. He once joked about amending the Constitution to allow Bill Clinton a third term. Mr. Ellison turned more conservative in the 21st century, developing a friendship with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and recoiling against what he saw as Barack Obama’s anti-Israel approach.
“Bill Clinton was a centrist. Tony Blair was a centre-right politician. Marco Rubio is centrist. Mitt Romney was a centrist. In 2018, Mr. Ellison stated that his politics were the same as President Trump’s. In the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Ellison supported Mr. Rubio, then a Trump-critic Republican senator from Florida. Mr. Trump convinced Mr. Ellison in 2020 to host a fundraiser at his golf club in Southern California. Ellison refused to attend the event even though his name was on the invitation. He claimed he was ill. Four years later, Mr. Trump wasn’t Mr. Ellison’s first choice of president. Mr. Ellison went to South Carolina to attend the presidential announcement speech by Senator Tim Scott. Scott called Mr. Ellison “one of his mentors”. It helped that he lived nearby at his newly purchased Florida home. While Mr. Ellison was not a member of Mr. Trump’s inner-circle and did not publicly donate to the campaign, he attended a Mar-a-Lago transition meeting to observe. It was during President Trump’s first term when Mr. Ellison became interested in TikTok. This led to an almost-deal between TikTok and Oracle, which was approved by Mr. Trump.
This is the second time Walmart will not be involved. This time, Walmart is not expected to be involved. According to a person who was involved in the talks, Safra Katz, the CEO of Oracle, and not Mr. Ellison, was the main negotiator for the TikTok negotiations. People close to the process say that even if Oracle does strike a deal with TikTok it won’t eliminate the other owners of the video app. And it probably will not involve the algorithm that has made the social media company so successful.
Mr. Ellison’s belief in technology remains unwavering. Terry Garnett, a marketing chief at Oracle, suffered the fate that many Oracle executives did when he was fired by Mr. Ellison. “It’s that simple.” “It’s that simple.”
So what if Oracle is not a consumer company, and if its most prominent attempt to try to become one — a line of cheap desktops in the late 1990s challenging Microsoft’s software domination — stumbled?
“Think of TikTok as video data — unstructured data that fits into another slice of that Oracle matrix,” said Mr. Garnett, now a private investor. “Whoever controls the data is the one who has the power.”
