How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul

For decades, Larry Ellison He had fun being the director of Silicon Valley who really knew how to have fun. He spent up to $ 200 million to build an imperial villa of Japanese inspiration near Palo Alto, California, purchased the sixth largest Hawaiian island and frequented and married and divorced with infinite zeal.

Few have paid close attention to what his database company, Oracle. Sometimes, not even Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his key speech at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win The American CupWhich he did. A biography on him was entitled: “The difference between God and Larry Ellison: God does not think it is Larry Ellison”.

With a fortune of $ 175 billion, it has not remained much to buy for Mr. Ellison who would have seriously affected his wallet. He beat a Florida record in 2022 when he bought a 22 -acri estate near Palm Beach, but at $ 173 million, the price was a tenth of 1 % of his wealth. Has invested $ 1 billion in Twitter acquisition by Elon Musk In the same year because, he said at that moment, “it would be very funny”.

Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or perhaps the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions as well as having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path established by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed on each other, Mr. Ellison also seems to have planned to grow his company empire.

Oracle continues to emerge how A possible bidder for TiktokThe wildly popular video app that the Congress has decreed must give up its property by the bytedance of Chinese Internet society or be banned in the United States. Wednesday, President Trump It plans to meet the best officials of the White House To discuss a new property structure for the app. The deadline for an agreement is Saturday, even if the deadlines of Tiktok went and went first.

Oracle became almost a minority owner of the US operations of Tiktok in 2020, together with Walmart, when the concerns for the security of the data of the app are spreading. An agreement was negotiated in which Oracle began to store US users’ data on its cloud. Oracle would do it too Have 12.5 percent of a new company, Tiktok Global. The latter part, like many business of Tiktok, has never happened.

Five years later, a lot has changed, starting from this: the technological tycoons have been unleashed.

Musk, supported by President Trump, canceled the lines between public and private. He is making government agencies explode and using his vast wealth to try to influence the elections. Mr. Ellison, who could be closer to Mr. Trump than any tycoon from this part of Mr. Musk, seems to want nothing less than bringing the country under the benevolent artificial intelligence Sway, who said he will lead to an era of generosity and harmony.

A company, even if it is successful as Oracle, may not help him get closer to this goal. Different, however, could.

Ellison is organizing most of the offer from $ 8 billion by his son, David, to buy Paramount, owner of the fabulous Hollywood Studio, as well as CBS, MTV and other properties that generate news and content. (The agreement still needs regulatory approval.) Tiktok, meanwhile, concerns the production of content. It has a monthly active user base of 1.5 billion, about a tenth in the United States.

And then there is the Jolly factor: the proximity of Mr. Ellison to President Trump. In January, Mr. Ellison was presented in the foreground to the White House for the announcement of a project called Stargatewhich will build data center for artificial intelligence. President Trump was asked if Mr. Musk could buy Tiktok, and he volunteered that “I would like Larry to buy it too”.

“All these pieces are combining to form something that is not yet clear enough, except this: the Ellison family will be at the center,” said Richard Greenfield, media analyst with Lightshed partners.

The White House, Tiktok, Mr. Ellison and Oracle refused to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. In any case, Mr. Ellison is looking along the road. “The only way I know I feel better is to improve the world,” he said to Vanity Fair in 1997, adding: “Don’t confuse it for altruism. It is Egotism. Call it illuminated Egotism.”

Mr. Ellison recently tried to improve the world by pushing for a surveillance company. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by AI

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we constantly register and bring everything that is happening,” said Oracle Investors last autumn. “It’s unbearable.”

Also in the list of things to do of Ellison, thousands of databases is combined in a huge electronic deposit, which can be extracted from the AI ​​who will take care of the diseases and solve everything else, told Tony Blair, former British prime minister, to a symposium on the reinvention of the government held in Dubai in February.

“I think this will make citizenship happier,” Blair said Mr. Ellison, who appeared through video.

Mr. Ellison’s search for data hit the setbacks. In November, a federal court in California gave the final approval to an agreement on a class cause that accused Oracle of having acquired and sold online and for sale improperly without their permission. Oracle agreed to pay $ 115 million without admitting offenses.

During Mr. Ellison’s mudguard in the 90s, he provided a surprising contrast to what was then a relatively sober silicon valley. He described his office style as “ridicule management”. After Oracle had an experience of pre-Morte autiinflitta, he explained: “Oracle is managed by teenagers. And this includes me”. He said to journalists that he would launch a struggle by prosecutor and obtained Apple control. He abandoned himself to a long -term feud, albeit unilateral, with Microsoft.

And then there were his wives and friends. “As a veteran of three weddings, do you feel you can do it better this time?” Playboy asked him in 2002.

“There is no doubt that I can do it better,” Ellison replied. “Can I do worse? I don’t think so.”

In 2003, he married Melanie Craft, a romantic novelist, who became his wife n. 4. Steve Jobs was the wedding photographer. Mrs. Craft wrote “Man Trouble”, on a journalist who convinces a romantic novelist to help him capture an interview with a shy billionaire.

Mr. Ellison’s policy at that time was mainstream. He said that the Constitution should be modified so that the president could have a third term, but the president was Bill Clinton and it was only a joke about a golf companion. Mr. Ellison became more conservative in the 21st century, developing a friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and backing down against what he saw as the anti-Israeli approach of Barack Obama.

“Bill Clinton was a center -like. Tony Blair was a center -off. Marco Rubio is a center -off. Mitt Romney is an centrist. Those are my policy”, Mr. Ellison said in 2018.

Now his policy is that of President Trump, but it took a while to get there. In the 2016 presidential race, Ellison supported Mr. Rubio, a republican senator of Florida and then a Trump critic. In 2020, Trump convinced Mr. Ellison to host a fundraising in his golf course in southern California. Although his name appeared on the invitation as the only guest, Mr. Ellison snubbed the event, telling people who were sick.

Four years later, Mr. Trump was, once again, the first choice of Mr. Ellison for the president. Ellison traveled to South Carolina for the speech on the presidential announcement of Senator Tim Scott, a republican of the South Carolina, where Scott defined the billionaire “one of my mentors”.

After Mr. Scott inflamed himself And Mr. Trump needed cash, Mr. Ellison approached the new Republican candidate, dinner with him in Mar-A-Lago. Helped to sometimes live nearby in its recently purchased Florida house.

While Mr. Ellison is not in the internal circle of Mr. Trump and did not make public donations to support the campaign, he appeared in Mar-A-Lago to participate in a transition meeting.

It was during the first term of President Trump that Mr. Ellison developed an interest in Tiktok, leading to the Quasi-deal between Tiktok, Oracle and Walmart This was approved by Mr. Trump.

This time, Walmart should not be involved. A friend of Mr. Ellison, who does not speak for the attribution to speak candidly, said that the technological tycoon was probably influenced by the ownership of Twitter by Mr. Musk, now called X. It is something to be rich, said the friend; Mr. Musk is relevant to consumers, with power in culture, politics and media.

Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, rather than Mr. Ellison, was the negotiator in Tiktok’s talks, according to a person involved in the trial. Even assuming that Oracle affects a sort of agreement with Tiktok, he probably will not eliminate other owners for the video app, the people close to the trial said. And it will probably not involve the algorithm that made the social media company so effective.

Mr. Ellison’s trust in technology is not immersed. Terry Garnett, a head of Oracle marketing, suffered the fate of many Oracle managers when he was fired by Mr. Ellison in 1994. For a certain period, Mr. Garnett has held Rancore but since then he has come to appreciate his former boss.

“In the end, he loves technology,” said Garnett. “It’s so simple.”

And if Oracle was not a consumption company and if its most important attempt to try to become one – a line of cheap desktops in the late 90s, challenging the domain of Microsoft’s software – stumbled?

“Think of Tiktok as video data – unstructured data that enters into another slice of that Oracle matrix,” said Garnett, now a private investor. “Anyone who has the data has power.”