For most of his career Larry Ellison has been content to quietly let Oracle be the company, behind the company, behind the technology that makes headlines. Its biggest products being cloud computing and database products that it sells to enterprise customers like DHL, Northwell Health, and Fanatics. But, now in his 80s, Ellison has begun a second act shifting from Silicon Valley pioneer, to media mogul.
Compared to many of the other people at the top of the Forbes Billionaires list, Larry Ellison tends to keep a low profile. That’s not to say he hasn’t seen his fair share of headlines, especially in recent years. But he, and his company Oracle, aren’t being routinely dragged in front of congress for high profile shouting matches, or being accused of ruining an entire generation of children in op-ed pages.
But over the course of his career, Ellison has developed a reputation for ruthless and sometimes ethically dubious behavior as head of Oracle. Biographer Karen Southwick even called him a “modern-day Genghis Khan.” Her book Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison, released in 2003, already identified Ellison as a man who would stop at nothing to have absolute power over his company, or his industry, purging executives “who dare to stand up to him” and engaging in hostile takeovers of competitors. He even bought most of a Hawaiian island, where the population is suspiciously exuberant in their praise of him.
His ventures into the media space began modestly enough by backing Annapurna Pictures and Skydance Productions, companies founded by his children Megan and David Ellison, respectively. Eventually both of those companies expanded to become major players in the television and video game spaces. But things have accelerated dramatically since then.
He briefly expanded his power at Annapurna in 2018 as his daughter’s studio found itself buried in debt. His role in day-to-day operations isn’t clear, but he spearheaded a reorganization of the company, brokered a deal to pay off the $200 million in debt, and changed how Annapurna would finance films going forward. Rather than rely on bank loans, the studio would seek investors for projects on a case-by-case basis or simply be financed by Megan Ellison entirely.
In 2022 Larry Ellison gave Elon Musk $1 billion to help fund his purchase of Twitter (now X). And last year Skydance Media merged with Paramount creating a conglomerate with almost unmatched reach. While Larry’s son David runs Paramount on paper, it’s the father who actually owns the company. This means that Larry Ellison owns a controlling stake in a broadcast network (CBS), a major streaming platform (Paramount+), multiple movie studios, CBS News, and pay-TV channels like Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, and Showtime.
And now Oracle is likely going to own a major portion of TikTok in the US. Many details of the deal are still murky, and there’s been some contradictory reporting about what will and won’t remain in ByteDance’s control. But as Clare Malone says in a recent New Yorker article, it’s unlikely the deal will do much to address any of the supposed national security concerns around TikTok and, “instead, the deal’s more immediate impact would be to bolster an emerging media conglomerate, under the auspices of the Ellison family, who are assiduously friendly to Trump.”
I think Malone is underselling things quite a bit in describing the family’s empire as “emerging” however. Paramount Skydance is already one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. And one that has shown a willingness to make decisions destined to please the president, like pushing a prominent critic of the administration in Stephen Colbert, off the air. David Ellison is also rumored to be in talks to acquire Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, and “the new owner of CBS News is weighing giving Ms. Weiss the job of editor in chief or co-president of the network,” according to the New York Times. Weiss portrays herself as a sort of centrist provocateur, though the most frequent target of her antagonism is the “mainstream media,” a foil that lines up nicely with the White House’s interests.
Some of this embracing of right wing interests and offering tokens of appeasement might seem par for the course to keep the White House off your back as a media company in 2025. But Larry Ellison’s behavior over the last 40-plus years has shown he won’t let things like rules, or even good sportsmanship, stand in the way of him getting what he wants. Oracle’s yachting team was caught cheating at the 2013 America’s Cup and Ellison famously hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Microsoft and Bill Gates during the company’s monopoly woes in 1999.
Now Paramount is reportedly looking to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give the family ownership of another major movie studio, another major streaming service (HBO Max), CNN, and more. To call the scope such a merger unprecedented would be dramatically underselling things.
What makes this family empire so unique is, as the New York Times points out, if he wants to continue to build out his budding media monolith, money isn’t a constraint. Larry Ellison’s wealth fluctuates by as much as $100 billion a day — more than the GDP of roughly two-thirds of the world’s countries according to the International Monetary Fund. While Ellison hasn’t shown much of a penchant for running a media company so far, his staggering wealth gives him plenty of leeway for making mistakes and learning on the job.
Larry Ellison already had his hands on a significant amount of American medical and financial data through Oracle. He’s helped build some of the world’s largest AI datacenters. Last year he added a major news outlet and traditional media conglomerate to his portfolio and, unless something unexpected happens, he’ll wield significant influence over one of the world’s biggest social media networks. In what feels like record time Larry Ellison has gone from a relatively lowkey, if excessively wealthy and flamboyant, tech CEO to one of the most powerful people in the world. And all the while his politics seem to be taking a more conspiratorial bent.
