For decades, Larry Ellison enjoyed being an executive in Silicon Valley who really knew how to have a good time. He spent $200 million building a Japanese-inspired empire villa near Palo Alto, California, buying the sixth largest Hawaiian Island, dating, getting married and divorced with endless enthusiasm.
Few people paid attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Ellison. He did not compete in the keynote speech at Oracle's annual conference held in San Francisco in 2013. The biography of him was entitled “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He is Larry Ellison.”
With a $175 billion fortune, there is not much left to buy Ellison seriously infuse his wallet. He broke Florida records when he bought a 22-acre property near Palm Beach in 2022, but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 10% of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition that same year. Because at the time he said, “It's going to be so much fun.”
Currently 80 years old and married for the fifth or perhaps sixth time, Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond not surrounding himself with something beautiful and enjoyable. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire by following the path set by his friend Musk, who has at least six companies that nourish each other.
Oracle continues to emerge as a Tiktok bidder. Tiktok is a very popular video app that Congress must remove ownership by Chinese internet companies or is banned in the US. On Wednesday, President Trump will meet with top White House officials to discuss the app's new ownership structure. Although the Tiktok deadline has happened previously, the transaction deadline is Saturday.
Oracle became a minority shareholder in Tiktok's US business in 2020, when concerns about app data security were rampant. If Oracle began storing data for US users in the cloud, a transaction was negotiated. Oracle also owns 12.5% ​​of the new company Tiktok Global. The latter part, like many Tiktok deals, never happened.
Five years later, I've started, so many things have changed. Technology Moguls have been unleashed.
Musk, backed by President Trump, erased the line between public and private. He is about to blow up government agencies and use his vast wealth to shake up elections. Ellison may be closer to Trump than any of Musk's big names, but he doesn't seem to want anything but to take the country under the benevolent agitation of artificial intelligence, saying he will bring an age of grace and harmony.
One company may not help him approach this goal, even if it is as successful as Oracle. But some may be.
Ellison has bought most of his son David's $8 billion bids with Paramount, the owner of legendary Hollywood studios, as well as CBS, MTV and other properties that generate news and content. (Trades still require regulatory approval.) Tiktok, on the other hand, is about creating content. Our monthly active user base is 1.5 billion, about a tenth of the US.
And then there is the wildcard factor. Ellison is close to President Trump. In January, Ellison was featured prominently at the White House for the announcement of a project called Stargate, which will build a data center for artificial intelligence. When asked if Musk might buy Tiktok, he volunteered, “I want Larry to buy it too.”
“All of these works come together to form something that is not yet clear except for this. The Ellison family is at the center,” said Richard Greenfield, media analyst at Lightshed Partners.
The White House, Tiktok, Ellison and Oracle either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. Either way, Mr. Ellison looks down the road. “The only way I know to make you feel better is to make the world better,” he told Vanity Fair in 1997, saying, “Don't mistake it for altruism. It's egoism. Call it enlightened egosism.”
Ellison has recently been trying to make the world better by promoting surveillance associations. There are cameras everywhere, along with all the movements analyzed by AI
“Citizens will always keep track of and report on everything that's going on, so they'll do their best,” he told Oracle Investors last fall. “I can't blame that.”
Ellison's to-do list also combines thousands of databases into one huge e-repository. This was in February at a symposium on government reinvention in Dubai, where he told former British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he had cured the illness and all other prime ministers Tony Blair.
“I think this will make you a happier citizen,” Ellison, who appeared via the video, told Blair.
Ellison's exploration of data was a hit. In November, a federal court in California finalized a settlement in a class action lawsuit that accused Oracle of improperly capturing and selling individuals' online and offline data without permission. Oracle has agreed to pay $115 million without admitting fraud.
During Ellison's glamorous heyday in the 1990s, he provided a prominent contrast to Silicon Valley, which was at the time relatively calm. He described his office style as “managed by Ridicule.” After Oracle had experiences near near death, he explained: “Oracle is run by youth, and that includes me,” he told reporters that he would launch a proxy fight and gain control of Apple. He indulges in a long, one-sided feud with Microsoft.
And then there was his wife and girlfriend. “As a veteran of three marriages, do you think I could do better this time?” Playboy asked him in 2002.
“I'm sure I can do it better,” Ellison replied. “Can I do something worse? I don't think so.”
In 2003 he married romance novelist Melanie Kraft, and became his wife No. 4. Steve Jobs was a wedding photographer. Kraft wrote “Man Trouble” about a reporter who persuades a romance novelist to help him interview a shy billionaire.
Ellison's ideal politician in that era was a Democrat. He once joked that the constitution should be amended so that Bill Clinton could have a third term. Ellison became more conservative in the 21st century, building friendship with Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu, and recoiling against what Barack Obama saw as an anti-Israel approach.
“Bill Clinton was a centric. Tony Blair was a centric. Marco Rubio is a centric. Mitt Romney is a centric. Those are my politics,” Ellison said in 2018.
Now, his politics are President Trump, but it took him a while to get there. In the 2016 presidential election, Ellison supported Rubio, a Republican Sen. in Florida, and Trump critics. In 2020, Trump convinced Ellison to hold a fundraiser at a golf course in Southern California. His name appeared on the invitation as the sole host, but Ellison snapped the event and told people he was sick.
Four years later, Trump once again, Ellison was not his first choice for the president. Ellison traveled to South Carolina for a speech to Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican of South Carolina, to announce the president, where Scott called the billionaire “one of my leaders.”
After Scott was on fire and Trump needed cash, Ellison approached the new Republican candidate and dined with him at Mar Lago. He helped him live nearby at times in Florida, where he recently bought house.
Ellison is not in Trump's inner circle, but did not make public donations to support the campaign, but he appeared at Mar Arago to attend a transition meeting.
During Trump's first term, Ellison became interested in Tiktok, reaching nearly a deal between Tiktok, Oracle and Walmart, which was approved by Trump.
Walmart is not expected to be involved this time. Ellison's friend said he didn't speak for belongings to speak up in an openness, saying the tech mogul was probably influenced by Musk's Twitter ownership. It is now called X. Musk is associated with consumers with cultural, political and media powers.
Not Ellison, but Oracle's CEO Safra Cats, was the negotiator for Tiktok's speech, according to anyone involved in the process. Assuming Oracle is doing some sort of deal with Tiktok, it probably won't rule out other owners of the video app, people close to the process said. And perhaps it doesn't include the algorithms that have made social media companies successful.
Ellison's belief in technology is uninterrupted. Oracle Marketing Chief Terry Garnett suffered from the fate of many Oracle executives when he was fired by Ellison in 1994.
“At the end, he loves technology,” Garnett said. “It's that easy.”
If Oracle is not a consumer company, and what happens when its most notable attempts try to become one?
“Think of Tiktok as video data, unstructured data that fits into another slice of that Oracle Matrix,” says Garnett, a current private investor. “Everyone who has data has the power.”
