For decades, Larry Ellison enjoyed being the Silicon Valley director who really knew how he could have a good time. He spent no less than $ 200 million on building a Japanese -inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, California, bought the sixth largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and separated with never ending zeal.
Few have paid a lot of attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes Mr. Ellison did not do either. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle's annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he tried to win the America's Cup on his yacht what he did. A biography about him was entitled: “The difference between God and Larry Ellison: God does not think he is Larry Ellison.”
With a fortune of $ 175 billion, there is not much left for Mr Ellison to buy that his wallet would seriously dent. He broke a record in Florida in 2022 when he bought an estate of 22 hectares near Palm Beach for $ 173 million, the prize was a tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $ 1 billion in the takeover of Twitter from Elon Musk that same year because, he said at the time, “It would be very nice.”
Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison are ambitions than having fun and surrounding beautiful things. Following a path recorded by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed each other, seems to be planning to make Mr Ellison's business empire grow.
Oracle continues to stand up as a possible bidder for Tiktok, the wildly popular video app that has decided the congress, must implement or be banned from the ownership of the Chinese internet company in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump is planning to meet top officials of the White House to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, although tick deadlines have come earlier and gone.
Oracle almost became a minority owner of the American activities of Tiktok in 2020, together with Walmart, when the concern about the data security of the app ran unbridled. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of American users on his cloud. Oracle would also have 12.5 percent of a new company, Tiktok Global. The last part, like many Tiktok -Deals, never happened.
Five years later a lot has changed, starting with this: the technical moguls are unleashed.
Mr. Musk, supported by President Trump, has erased the lines between the public and private life. He blows up government agencies and uses his enormous wealth to try to influence elections. Mr. Ellison, who is perhaps closer to Mr Trump than every Mogul on this side of Mr. Musk, seems to want nothing less than bringing the country under the benevolent influence of artificial intelligence, which he said will create a era of premium and harmony.
One company, even if it is as successful as Oracle, may not help him near this goal. But more maybe.
Mr. Ellison brings most of the $ 8 billion bid from his son, David, to buy Paramount, owner of the legendary Hollywood Studio and CBS, MTV and other characteristics that generate news and content. (The deal still needs approval.) Meanwhile, Tiktok is all about producing content. It has a monthly active user base of 1.5 billion, about a tenth of them in the United States.
And then there is the wildcard factor: the proximity of Mr Ellison to President Trump. In January, Mr. Ellison was prominent in the White House for the announcement of a project called Stargate, which will build data centers for artificial intelligence. President Trump was asked if Mr. Musk Tiktok could buy, and he offered that “I want Larry to buy it too.”
“All these pieces come together to form something that is not yet completely clear, except this: the Ellison family will be in the center,” says Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Lightshed Partners.
The White House, Tiktok, Mr. Ellison and Oracle refused to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Ellison looks at the road in any case. “The only way I know to make myself feel better is to make the world better,” he told Vanity Fair in 1997 and added: “Make no mistake with altruism. It is selfishness. Name the enlightenment.”
Mr. Ellison recently tried to improve the world by insisting on a security company. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by AI
“Citizens will have their best behavior, because we constantly record everything and report what is going on,” he told Oracle Investors last fall. “It's inviolable.”
Also on Mr Ellison's task list, combining thousands of databases in one huge electronic repository, which can be mined by AI who will heal diseases and repair everything else, he told Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, on a symposium about the reinstalling of the government in Dubai.
“I think this will ensure a happier citizen,” Mr. Ellison, who appeared via video, told Mr. Blair.
The search for data from Mr. Ellison has affected setbacks. In November, a federal court in California gave the final approval to a settlement on a class-action right case that accused Oracle of incorrect and selling the online and offline data of individuals without their permission. Oracle agreed to pay $ 115 million without admitting misconduct.
During the flamboyant heyday of Mr. Ellison in the nineties, he offered a striking contrast with what was then a relatively sober Silicon Valley. He described his office style as 'Management by Ridicule'. After Oracle had a self-killed near-death experience, he explained: “Oracle is run by adolescents. And that includes me.” He told reporters that he would launch a proxy fight and get control of Apple. He surrendered to a long -term, albeit the one -sided, feud with Microsoft.
And then there were women and girlfriends. “As a veteran of three marriages, do you feel that you can do better this time?” Playboy asked him in 2002.
“There is no doubt that I can do better,” Mr Ellison replied. “Can I do it worse? I don't think so.”
In 2003 he married Melanie Craft, a novel writer, who became nr. 4. Steve Jobs was the wedding photographer. Mrs. Craft wrote 'Man Trouble', about a reporter who convinces a novel writer to help him help an interview with a shy billionaire.
Mr. Ellison's ideal politician at the time was a democrat. He once joked that the constitution must be changed, so that Bill Clinton could have a third term. Mr. Ellison became more conservative in the 21st century, developed a friendship with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and back against what he saw as the anti-Israeli approach of Barack Obama.
“Bill Clinton was a centrist. Tony Blair was a centrist. Marco Rubio is a centrist. Mitt Romney is a centrist. That's my politics,” said Mr. Ellison in 2018.
Now his politics that President Trump is, but it has taken a while to get there. In the presidential race of 2016, Mr. Ellison supported Mr Rubio, a Republican Senator from Florida and then a Trump critic. In 2020, Mr. Trump persuaded Mr. Ellison to organize fundraising on his golf course in southern California. Although his name appeared on the invitation as the only host, Mr. Ellison sicked the event and people told him he was sick.
Four years later, Mr. Trump was again not the first choice of Mr Ellison for President. Mr. Ellison traveled to South Carolina for the speech of the presidential announcement of Senator Tim Scott, a Republican in South Carolina, where Mr. Scott called the billionaire 'one of my mentors'.
After Mr. Scott had flown away and Mr Trump needed cash, Mr. Ellison came closer to the new Republican nominated, dinner with him in Mar-A-Lago. It helped that he sometimes lives in the neighborhood in his recently purchased house in Florida.
Although Mr. Ellison is not in the inner circle of Mr. Trump and did not make any public donations to support the campaign, he appeared in Mar-A-Lago to participate in a transition meeting.
During President Trump's first term, Mr. Ellison developed an interest in Tiktok, which led to the near-deal under Tiktok, Oracle and Walmart that was approved by Mr. Trump.
This time it is not expected that Walmart will be involved. A friend of Mr. Ellison, who does not speak for attributing to talk frankly, said that the technical mogul was probably influenced by Mr. Musk's ownership of Twitter, now X. It is one thing to be rich, the friend said; Mr. Musk is relevant to consumers, with power in culture, politics and media.
Safra Catz, the Chief Executive of Oracle, instead of Mr Ellison, is, according to a person involved in the process, is the negotiator in the Tiktok interviews. Even assuming that Oracle has a kind of deal with Tiktok, it will probably not eliminate other owners for the video app, according to people near the process. And it will probably not include the algorithm that the social media company has made so successful.
Mr Ellison's faith in technology is not dimmed. Terry Garnett, a chief of Oracle Marketing, suffered the fate of many Oracle managers when he was fired by Mr Ellison in 1994. For a while Mr. Garnett kept resentment, but has since started appreciating his former boss.
“At the end of the day he likes technology,” said Mr. Garnett. “It's that simple.”
So what if Oracle is not a consumer company, and as the most prominent attempt to try to become one – a line of cheap desktops in the late 1990s that stumbled Microsoft's software -?
“Think of Tiktok as video data – unstructured data that fits into another part of that Oracle Matrix,” said Mr. Garnett, now a private investor. “The person who has the data has the power.”
