When Larry Ellison entered his ninth decade in 2024, his high-profile lifestyle seemed to be receding. The future promised fewer thrilling yacht races and mock dogfights over the Pacific and more legacy-securing philanthropic gestures. Software moguls get old, too.
Instead, in a remarkable new chapter, even by the standards of the truly rich, Mr. Ellison has suddenly decided to become a media magnate, one whose portfolio and power could exceed those of fabled predecessors like Hearst and Pulitzer.
Oracle, the tech company Mr. Ellison co-founded and still controls after nearly half a century, is among the investors in the newly formulated American version of TikTok, the short video app that claims 170 million U.S. users. Mr. Ellison owns more than 40 percent of Oracle’s stock and is its chief technology officer.
Many elements of the new TikTok remain unclear, including the exact ownership shares and who will run the company. About the only safe assumption is that the app will be controlled by people sympathetic to President Trump. The Murdoch family, the owners of Fox News, “probably” will be another investor, the president said last weekend in an interview on Fox News.
Congress had ordered the Chinese company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok for national security reasons, in a law whose enforcement was delayed by Mr. Trump.
With its remarkable appeal to young people, TikTok is quite a prize. Oracle already has a relationship with the app, using its cloud servers to handle U.S. users’ data. But this new deal could give it access to the consumer-facing side of the business. Oracle’s biggest venture into a consumer business, the network computer in the 1990s, was a flop.
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The post Larry Ellison, a Media Mogul Like No Other appeared first on New York Times.
