The behind-the-scenes billionaire poised to take over our information ecosystem
Last week Larry Ellison ranked as the richest man in the world. He may be shaping the information and media landscape for years to come.
Larry Ellison made headlines the other week, surpassing Elon Musk as the richest man in the world via his Oracle stock. This week, Ellison is the second-richest-man—but he’s also made news as the likely cloud provider of TikTok, should China agree to a deal.
The media is frequently circling around the varying love triangles around Trump—Zuckerberg, Bezos, previously Musk and now Altman—but where does the often overlooked Ellison sit in the ecosystem?
Well, Oracle’s stock surge last week is a result of Oracle and OpenAI signing a $300 billion cloud deal agreement, where OpenAI would purchase five years worth of Oracle’s computing power. An exclusive with the Wall Street Journal revealed that the contract would: “require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, roughly comparable to the electricity produced by more than two Hoover Dams or the amount consumed by about four million homes.” It’s one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed.
The precursors to this were vague cloud services agreement announcements by Oracle and OpenAI in June and July—followed by a quarter that took in $332bn of new business in the following three months. From the Financial Times:
The “astonishing quarter” was thanks to three customers signing four “multi-billion-dollar contracts”, CEO Safra Catz said. Neither she nor founder Larry Ellison would be drawn on the conference call to discuss how much was from one customer, OpenAI, which announced a Stargate data centre deal with Oracle in late June.
So, Oracle and Ellison were slowly gearing up to become a central artery of the information and AI ecosystem—not just as a cloud storage provider, but as a massive data center player. According to the Wall Street Journal’s report on the deal:
Oracle is working with the data-center builder Crusoe, among others, as part of the deal. They are looking to build data centers in locations across the country, including in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan, and New Mexico, according to a person familiar with the matter.
So perhaps some of the data center plans signed away by NDAs are Oracle’s.
And what about Ellison himself? Another Wall Street Journal piece places 81-year-old Ellison as someone who has been angling for this position for some time:
“I’m addicted to winning,” Ellison told “60 Minutes” in 2004. “The more you win, the more you want to win.”
And also:
Ellison has voiced a desire to be the world’s richest person for years, according to a person familiar with the matter. He has funneled much of his wealth into real estate. His holdings include a massive estate in Malibu, an 8,000-square-foot home in Silicon Valley modeled on an imperial Japanese palace, a villa in Japan and the crown jewel: the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he purchased 98% of in 2012 and has since developed into a luxury holistic wellness resort.
Larry isn’t the only Ellison making headlines. His son, David, is now at the center of power at Paramount—CBS’s parent company—after the $8 billion merger between the younger Ellison’s company Skydance Media and Paramount. Together, they are considering an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery—as well as an acquisition of former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss’ “anti-woke” publication The Free Press at $100 million. The New York Times reported recently that Weiss, a major pro-Israel voice, is being considered for a major role at CBS.
Ellison and Oracle’s close connection to Israel has been reported on frequently. Ellison has a tight friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Oracle’s current CEO, Safra Catz, is an Israeli-American. Substack writer Jack Paulson has a crucial deep dive into Ellison’s connection to the Israeli military.
In 2023, Oracle announced that it would be providing more resources to the Israeli military—something that we covered at Hard Reset last month, with Oracle employees resigning in protest.
Between CBS, TikTok, and Oracle’s recent stock surge and data center dealings— Ellison is a billionaire to watch. Even if more behind the scenes than Musk or Zuckerberg, his chokehold on the structures and systems powering our information and media ecosystems may be indelible in the years ahead.
Here’s what else we’re paying attention to this week:
A group of human raters training Google’s AI system were fired after they tried to bargain for more.
Five Microsoft employees who are part of the No Azure for Apartheid coalition speak on a podcast about their activism.
Last week, I read Eli’s piece about Karen Hao’s book, Empire of AI—this week I watched her interview with comic Hasan Minhaj. She compares the hype around AI to the mythology of sci-fi series Dune.
What happens when AI claims that original writing is in fact AI?
Narrative before reality? Anthropic is investing in corporate communications jobs—with the head of corporate comms job going for $400k/year.
The global opinions editor at the Washington Post, Karen Attiah, was fired for quoting Charlie Kirk in one of her articles. Read more in her Substack:
