Business
Meet Larry Ellison: the 81-year-old tech billionaire-turned-media mogul whose family could soon own CBS, Paramount, CNN, and TikTok
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and chief technology officer, has by all means conquered the tech world. With a net worth near $345 billion, the database pioneer began his success by founding Oracle in the 1970s. Earlier this month, he briefly became the richest person in the world, topping Elon Musk before going back to second place.
But now the Ellison name has a new venture: media. The 81-year-old, alongside his son, David, could soon own CBS, Paramount, CNN and TikTok.
Ellison has been an ongoing ally of the president, raising millions for his campaign and advising him during the COVID-19 pandemic. And now, he’s poised to play a critical role in President Donald Trump’s executive order for TikTok’s U.S. operations. The U.S. branch of TikTok is valued at approximately $14 billion. Oracle, along with private equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX will control around 45%. The executive order allows for 120 days for Ellison’s investor group to work out details with Bytedance, the current owner of TikTok.
Meanwhile, with the help of his father’s money, David, the 42-year-old founder and CEO of Skydance Media—the company behind hit films like Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible— has secured an $8 billion deal to purchase Paramount and its subsidiaries including CBS, MTV, and Comedy Center. David is also reportedly eyeing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent media conglomerate behind brands like HBO, CNN and TBS.
Altogether, the Ellison family name is taking shape to be the future of movies, streaming, TV shows and more.
Larry Ellison’s road to wealth as a two-time college dropout
Before the Oracle founder spent his free time racing sailboats and flying planes, the self-made billionaire was raised by his aunt and uncle in Chicago. He first attended the University of Illinois but dropped out after his adoptive mother passed away. Later in 1966, he enrolled at University of Chicago, where he took computer science classes for about a semester before dropping out once more.
He then swiftly moved to California and picked up programming skills. From there, he hopped around different jobs from Wells Fargo to tech company Amdahl, where he adapted more programming skills before becoming his own boss at just 33 years old.
With an initial investment of just $2,000, Ellison co-founded Software Development Laboratories in 1977—the database company which would later become Oracle Corporation. It went on to become the backbone of some of the world’s most popular enterprise software offerings, and even stayed as a salient figure in the dot-com boom when it supplied databases to startup companies.
With a market cap of over $811 billion, Ellison still owns about 40% of the technology giant—and his technology giant has become so influential it provides data services to governments.
Today, the billionaire pledged to give away 95% of his fortune through the Ellison Institute of Technology, which aims to address global issues such as healthcare, food insecurity, climate change, and AI advancements, with a major new campus opening in Oxford worth approximately $1.3 billion. And he’s already donated millions to cancer research and treatment centers.
