September was life-changing for 81-year-old billionaire entrepreneur Larry Ellison and his family.
After announcing that his flagship database software company, Oracle, had a backlog of orders amounting to nearly $100 billion on red-hot demand for artificial intelligence, as well as announcing several other multi-billion-dollar contracts with companies including OpenAI, Nvidia, and Meta, Ellison saw his fortune jump to an astronomic $393 billion, briefly surpassing Elon Musk for the title of world’s richest person.
Ellison’s empire is no longer limited to the technology industry, however. He is now emerging as a powerful, yet quiet, media mogul. Ellison helped finance his son David’s Skydance Media in its $8 billion takeover of Paramount, completed in August. The Ellison family is now supporting Paramount’s $70 billionplus bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that could make them a leading force in the entertainment sector.
But Larry Ellison’s biggest coup might be yet to come. Recently, President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing a deal to keep the Chinese social media behemoth TikTok operating in the US. The order meets national security rules that require Chinese parent ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations or face a ban.
Pending Beijing’s approval, a new joint venture led by Ellison, private equity group Silver Lake, and the Abu Dhabi-based AI and tech investor MGX would run TikTok in the US, with ByteDance holding under 20% ownership.
Under the reported arrangement, Oracle would handle TikTok US’s security operations while also supplying cloud computing services for the newly formed company.
ByteDance is currently valued at around $330 billion. Although US Vice President JD Vance recently stated that the new US-based TikTok would be worth about $14 billion, analysts see a very different picture, saying it would start between $35 billion and $50 billion, according to a CFRA Research note.
Between the Paramount and TikTok deals, the last act of Larry Ellison’s career could be unprecedented control of US media.
