How Trump could turn Larry Ellison into the next media tycoon

For decades, Larry Ellison delighted to be the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent up to $ 200 million building an imperial villa of Japanese inspiration near Palo Alto, California, bought the sixth largest Hawaiian island and dated, married and divorced endless heat.

Few paid close attention to exactly what their database company did, Oracle,. Sometimes, Nor Mr. Ellison. He did not present his key talk at the Oracle Annual Convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the Copa América, which he did. A biography about him was titled: “The difference between God and Larry Ellison: God does not believe it is Larry Ellison.”

With a fortune of $ 175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously be his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he bought a property of 22 acres near Palm Beach, but at $ 173 million, the price was a tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $ 1 billion in the acquisition of twitter by Elon Musk that same year because, he said at that time, “it would be very fun.”

Now 80 years and married to the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. After a path established by his friend, Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed each other, Ellison also seems to be planning to grow his corporate empire.

Oracle continues to emerge as a possible bidder for Tiktok, the very popular video application that Congress has decreed the needs of disinterting of its property by the Chinese Internet Company Bytedance or being prohibited in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with the top of the White House to discuss a new property structure for the application. The deadline for an agreement is Saturday, although Tiktok's deadlines have gone and come before.

Oracle almost became a minority owner of American Tiktok operations in 2020, together with Walmart, when concerns about application data safety are rapid. An agreement was negotiated where Oracle began storing the data of US users in their cloud. Oracle too possess 12.5 percent From a new company, Tiktok Global. The last part, like many Tiktok offers, never happened.

Five years later, much has changed, starting with this: technological magnates have unleashed.

Musk, backed by President Trump, has erased the lines between public and private. It is flying to government agencies and using their vast wealth to try to influence the elections. Ellison, who can be closer to Mr. Trump than any tycoon on this side of Mr. Musk, seems to want nothing less than lead to the country under the benevolent domain of artificial intelligence, which has said that it will cause an era of generosity and harmony.

A company, even if it is as successful as Oracle, may not help you approach this goal. Several, however, could.

Mr. Ellison is presenting most of the offer of $ 8 billion of his son, David, to buy Paramount, owner of the legendary Hollywood study, as well as CBS, MTV and other properties that generate news and content. (The agreement still needs regulatory approval). Tiktok, meanwhile, it's about producing content. It has a monthly active user base of 1,500 million, approximately one tenth of them in the United States.

And then there is the wild card factor: the proximity of Mr. Ellison with President Trump. In January, Mr. Ellison appeared prominently 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 Musk could buy Tiktok, and he volunteered that “I would like Larry to buy it too.”

“All these pieces come together to form something that is not yet, except for this: the Ellison family will be in the center,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst of light partners.

The White House, Tiktok, Mr. Ellison and Oracle declined to comment or did not respond to comments requests. Mr. Ellison in any case is looking towards the road. “The only way I know to feel better is to improve the world,” he told Vanity Fair in 1997, he added: “You don't confuse that with altruism. It's selfishness. Call it enlightened egagism.”

Mr. Ellison has been trying to improve the world by pressing for a surveillance society. There would be cameras everywhere, with each movement analyzed by ai

“Citizens will be in their best behavior, because we are constantly registering and informing everything that is happening,” the past fall told Oracle Investors. “It's impeccable.”

Also in the list of pending tasks of Mr. Ellison is combining thousands of databases in a huge electronic repository, which can be extracted by ai that will cure diseases and fix everything else, he told Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, in a symposium on reinventing the government held in Dubai in February.

“I think this will be a happier citizenship,” said Mr. Ellison, who appeared by video, Mr. Blair.

Mr. Ellison's data search has pressed setbacks. In November, a federal court in California gave the final approval to an agreement on a demand for collective action that accused Oracle of capturing and selling incorrectly the online and offline data of the people without their permission. Oracle agreed to pay $ 115 million without admitting irregularities.

During the extravagant peak of Mr. Ellison in the 1990s, he provided a surprising contrast with what was then a relatively sober silicon valley. He described the style of his office as “ridiculous management.” After Oracle had a self -inflicted experience close to death, he explained: “Oracle is directed by adolescents. And that includes me.” He told journalists that he was going to launch a fighting and winning Apple control. He delivered to a long and unilatatory dispute with Microsoft.

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

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

In 2003, he married Melanie Craft, a romantic novelist, who became a wife No. 4. Steve Jobs was the wedding photographer. Mrs. Craft wrote “Man Trouble”, about a journalist who persuads a novelist of romance to help him hook an interview with a shy billionaire.

Ellison's ideal politician at that time was a Democrat. Once he joked that the Constitution should be amended so that Bill Clinton could have a third mandate. Mr. Ellison became more conservative in the 21st century, developing a friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and backing against what he saw as the antiisraeli approach to Barack Obama.

“Bill Clinton was a centrist. Tony Blair was a centrist. Marco Rubio is a centrist. Mitt Romney is a centrist. That is my policy,” Mr. Ellison He said in 2018.

Now his policy is that of President Trump, but it took time to get there. In the 2016 presidential race, Ellison supported Mr. Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and then a Trump critic. In 2020, Trump persuaded Ellison to organize a fund collector in his golf course in southern California. Although his name appeared in the invitation as the only host, Ellison rejected the event, telling the people who were sick.

Four years later, Trump was, once again, not Ellison's first option for president. Mr. Ellison traveled to South Carolina for the presidential announcement of Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, where Scott described the billionaire “one of my mentors.”

After Scott shot and Trump needed cash, Ellison approached the new Republican candidate, having dinner with him in Mar-a-lago. He helped that sometimes he lives near his recently bought Florida. home.

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

It was during President Trump's first term that Ellison developed an interest in Tiktok, which led to almost traffic between Tiktok, Oracle and Walmart that was approved by Mr. Trump.

This time, Walmart is not expected to be involved. A friend of Mr. Ellison, who spoke not for the attribution to speak frankly, said the technological tycoon was probably influenced by twitter's property by Musk, now called x. It is a thing to be rich, said the friend; Mr. Musk is relevant to consumers, with power in culture, politics and media.

Safra Catz, the executive director of Oracle, instead of Mr. Ellison, has been the negotiator in Tiktok conversations, according to a person involved in the process. Even assuming that Oracle reaches some kind of deal with Tiktok, he will probably not eliminate other owners for video application, people close to the process said. And the algorithm will probably not involve that has made the social media company so successful.

The faith of Mr. Ellison in technology does not flinch. Terry Garnett, a Marketing Chief from Oracle, suffered the fate of many Oracle executives when he was fired by Mr. Ellison in 1994. For a while, Mr. Garnett was raised, but since then he has come to appreciate his former boss.

“At the end of the day he loves technology,” Garnett said. “It's that simple.”

So what happens if Oracle is not a consumer company, and if its most prominent attempt to try to become one, a line of cheap desks at the end of the 1990s, challenging the domination of Microsoft software?

“Think of Tiktok as video data: unstructured data that fit into another portion of that Oracle matrix,” said Mr. Garnett, now a private investor. “Whoever has the data has the power.”