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For decades, Larry Ellison reveled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.
Few paid much attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the America’s Cup, which he did. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”
With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.”
Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.
Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.
Mr. Ellison is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David, to buy Paramount, owner of the fabled Hollywood studio as well as CBS, MTV and other properties that generate news and content. (The deal still needs regulatory approval.) TikTok, meanwhile, is all about producing content. It has a monthly active user base of 1.5 billion, about a tenth of them in the United States.
And then there’s the wild card factor: Mr. Ellison’s proximity to President Trump. In January, Mr. Ellison was prominently featured at the White House for the announcement of a project called Stargate, which will build data centers for artificial intelligence. President Trump was asked if Mr. Musk might buy TikTok, and he volunteered that “I’d like Larry to buy it, too.”
One company, even if it is as successful as Oracle, might not help him get close to this goal. Several, though, might.
Mr. Ellison has recently been trying to make the world better by pushing for a surveillance society. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by A.I.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he told Oracle investors last fall. “It’s unimpeachable.”
Also on Mr. Ellison’s to-do list is combining thousands of databases into one enormous electronic repository, which can be mined by A.I. That will cure diseases and fix everything else, he told Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, at a symposium on reinventing government held in Dubai in February.
“Mr. Ellison’s quest for data has hit setbacks. In November, a federal court in California gave final approval to a settlement over a class-action suit that accused Oracle of improperly capturing and selling individuals’ online and offline data without their permission. Oracle agreed to pay $115 million without admitting wrongdoing.”
And then there were his wives and girlfriends. “As a veteran of three marriages, do you feel you can do it better this time?” Playboy asked him in 2002.
Mr. Ellison is not in Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and did not make public donations to support the campaign, but he appeared at Mar-a-Lago to sit in on a transition meeting.
While Mr. Ellison is not in Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and did not make public donations to support the campaign, he appeared at Mar-a-Lago to sit in on a transition meeting.
This time, Walmart is not expected to be involved. A friend of Mr. Ellison, speaking not for attribution in order to talk candidly, said the tech mogul was probably influenced by Mr. Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now called X. It’s one thing to be rich, the friend said; Mr. Musk is relevant to consumers, with power in culture, politics and media.
Safra Catz, the chief executive of Oracle, rather than Mr. Ellison, has been the negotiator in the TikTok talks, according to a person involved in the process. Even assuming Oracle strikes some sort of deal with TikTok, it probably won’t eliminate other owners for the video app, people close to the process said. And it probably will not involve the algorithm that has made the social media company so successful.
“Think of TikTok as video data — unstructured data that fits into another slice of that Oracle matrix,” said Mr. Garnett. “Whoever has the data has the power.”
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