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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.
Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of U.S. users on its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5 percent of a new company, TikTok Global. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.
