Larry Ellison has been a Silicon Valley titan for nearly half a century. Now 81, with the help of his son David, he is redefining himself as a 21st-century version of the 20th-century press baron, at the head of an empire straddling tech, media and politics.
‘CEO of everything’
Ellison co-founded Software Development Laboratories in 1977 with an initial investment of just $2,000. The software and database company, which would later become Oracle Corporation, is now valued at more than $800 billion, and Ellison still owns 40%.
He stepped down as CEO in 2014 but, far from calling it a day, the octogenarian has since “clawed his way back to the top of the tech heap”, said the Financial Times.
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Ellison is “forging new personal alliances” as he attempts to position himself in the “vanguard of the AI revolution”. His net worth has doubled in the last year, largely due to the key role Oracle is playing in building AI infrastructure, entering lucrative deals with the likes of OpenAI and governments around the world. His big bet on artificial intelligence saw him briefly become the world’s richest person in September.
Until recently, Ellison’s extracurricular interests have “tended to skew towards yachting, tennis, anti-ageing research and buying an island in Hawaii”, said the BBC, and a late-in-life transformation into media mogul is “an unlikely path”. Yet with son David in tow, he has “taken on a new dimension” as the pair pursue deals “that would give them control over some of the biggest media companies on the planet”.
In August, David Ellison’s Skydance Media, the Hollywood production company behind hit films like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible”, secured an $8 billion deal to purchase Paramount and its subsidiaries, including MTV, Comedy Central and the influential CBS News network. The company is also in talks to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent media conglomerate behind brands like HBO, CNN and TBS.
Oracle has also been chosen to be part of a consortium to take over a minority stake in TikTok’s US operations, giving it a greater role in retraining the algorithm that serves up what people see.
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These deals, in particular the one to acquire a stake in TikTok, would not have been possible without the explicit support of Donald Trump. Asked about the future of TikTok recently, the president did not hesitate to answer: “I’d like Larry to buy it.” Earlier this year, Trump called Ellison “an amazing man and amazing business person” and “sort of CEO of everything”. And indeed, “taken together, these investments put Ellison at the heart of some of the world’s most powerful outlets in both traditional and new media”, said The Telegraph.
‘Dangerous for democracy’
It is “against the backdrop of wider White House pressure on the media” that the Ellisons’ “growing power and ties to Trump have stoked alarm on the left, where critics fear the president’s ability to influence news coverage of his administration”, said the BBC.
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren has called for any Paramount-Warner Bros. merger to be blocked as a “dangerous concentration of power”, while US media watchdog Fair warned recently that “the Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy. And given their closeness to the Trump regime, that seems to be the point.”
So far, the Ellisons “have not indicated that they intend to advance a political agenda with their media empire”, said The Washington Post. David, who has donated to the Democratic Party and in 2022 described himself as a “socially liberal person”, wrote after the Paramount-Skydance merger that “everything we do will be rooted in trust, guided by facts”. He said the company wants to “look at the 70% of the country that kind of would define themselves as centre left to centre right”.
The big question now is whether it is the father or the son who will ultimately decide the direction of what could soon be one of the world’s biggest and most influential media companies. Whether Larry Ellison’s takeover of the US media is “born of ideology or merely a pragmatic approach to protecting his business interests remains unclear”, said The Telegraph, “but it comes as Trump tightens his grip over his liberal media foes”.
