When Larry Ellison entered his ninth decade in 2024, his high -standard lifestyle seemed to be slowing down. The future promised less exciting yacht races and simulated Pacific combat, and more philanthropic gestures to ensure its legacy. After all, software tycoons also get older.
But in a surprising chapter, even for the standards of the truly rich, Ellison suddenly decided to become a media tycoon, with a portfolio and power that can overcome legendary predecessors such as Hearst and Pulitzer.
Oracle (), the technology company that Ellison has co -founded and still controls after almost half a century,, the short video app that claims to have 170 million users in the US. Ellison has over 40% of Oracle’s shares and is her technology director.
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Many details about the new Tiktok are still uncertain, including the exact division of the actions and who will command the company. The only safe assumption is that the app will be controlled by friendly people to President Donald Trump. The Murdoch family, owner of Fox News, “probably” will be another investor, the president said last weekend in an interview with Fox News.
Congress ordered the Chinese company bytedance to arrange for Tiktok for national security reasons, in a law whose application was postponed by Trump.
With its remarkable appeal among young people, Tiktok is a valuable prize. Oracle already has a relationship with the app using its cloud servers to manage US user data. But this new agreement can give the company access to the consumer. Oracle’s largest onslaught in the consumer market, the network computer in the 1990s was a failure.
Tiktok is just part of the Ellison family media portfolio, which grows rapidly. Ellison’s son David, who recently signed a $ 8 billion agreement for Paramount and CBS and is leaving his mark in these companies, is widely, which includes CNN.
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In any other time, the regulatory obstacles to have Tiktok, CBS and CNN, along with a large slice of Hollywood, would be insurmountable. This is a different moment when being in Trump’s good graces counts a lot. The president said in January that he would like Elon Musk, then his nearby advisor, or Ellison bought Tiktok.
Powerful families have controlled large pieces of American media in the last century, but their reach was often limited by geographical factors or others. The Chandler family, owner of the Los Angeles Times, dominated southern California for decades, but had little power in other regions. Rupert Murdoch owns Fox and Wall Street Journal, but the editorial missions of these companies do not overlap.
In the digital age, these limitations are disappearing.
“Everything is consolidating itself,” said Michael Socolow, media historian at the University of Maine. “What makes these businesses different is that they cover multiple platforms. Having the opportunity to establish an editorial line on Tiktok, CBS News and CNN – that’s a new world.”
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Paramount declined to comment.
Money, a traditional restriction on media empires, is not an obstacle to Ellison. He recently saw the value of his shares on Oracle up about $ 100 billion, briefly making him the richest man in the world. Ellison now has a net equity of $ 367 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk is ahead.
Ellison, 81, has been present in Silicon Valley for much longer than any other founder. In 1977, he and two colleagues founded the Laboratories Development Software, which a few years later was renamed Oracle, in honor of his main database product.
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He was less a technical genius and the main salesman. Oracle faced several crises, but survived and prospered, unlike most software companies of that time.
On the way, Ellison was the prototype of the technology entrepreneur who works hard and has a lot of fun. He has been married several times and has large properties, including almost the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai. He also owns a Siai-Marchetti S.211 fighter, bought from the Italian Navy, and would have worn the plane for simulated combat with his son.
“Often, I’m in a meeting and the person says, ‘My God, you’re nothing I imagined,” Ellison said in an interview of 2012. “Of course, the pattern is low. I didn’t bit the head of an animal before the meeting.”
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Ellison never showed a lot of interest in the media and using interviews in the 1990s to criticize Bill Gates, co -founder of Microsoft and her longtime enemy. Your child is in negotiations to acquire The Free Press, a new digital publication that presents itself as opposition to traditional media. The vehicle is driven by Bari Weiss, who will probably have some control over CBS. Weiss worked as the opinion section editor of The New York Times and occasionally wrote rehearsals.
Ellison, who has not responded at the request for comment, is accumulating money faster than she can plan how to spend it. It has been dedicated to a vast vast philanthropic entity for profit that is building at Oxford University, where it says it will “concentrate my resources.” But in recent weeks, the Research Institute, called Ellison Institute of Technology, faced some of the same turmoil that marked Ellison’s previous philanthropic projects.
The billionaire has a history of changing his mind about his philanthropic work or breaking with the people he hires to manage it. This month, Ellison separated from John Bell, a renowned scientist who had been hired last year to lead EIT and who gave instant credibility to the project.
British scientific culture is less commercial than the United States, a situation that the institute intended to change by developing various startups in life sciences and other areas.
“We have no one like him in the UK,” Bell said about his benefactor. “So having you here saying ‘I’ll build my legacy here in the UK’ is an amazing step. And he could have gone anywhere.”
In mid-August, Ellison hired Santa Ono, former president of the University of Michigan, with a position that seemed superior to Bell. Ellison said Bell would “collaborate” with ono. But two weeks later, Bell announced his departure, calling the Institute “very challenging project”.
Ellison has been very present at the Institute, according to a close person, communicating regularly with Bell and attending meetings at the Institute’s office in Oxford. There is a tension in leading the best way to market Ellison’s scientific research, as well as persistent doubts about how much the institute can trust Ellison will fulfill his financial commitments.
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