Tech patriarch takes media empire to a new level

The database billionaire and his son, David, are Trump favourites. The family could soon control an empire that includes CBS, Paramount, Warner, CNN and a piece of TikTok, write David Streitfeld and Theodore Schleifer from San Francisco and Washington

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Larry Ellison's son, David, has secured an $8 billion deal for Paramount and CBS.

(PHOTOS BY NYT)

When Larry Ellison entered his ninth decade in 2024, his high-profile lifestyle seemed to be receding.

The future promised fewer thrilling yacht races and mock dogfights over the Pacific and more legacy-securing philanthropic gestures. Software moguls get old, too.

Instead, in a remarkable new chapter, even by the standards of the truly rich, Mr Ellison has suddenly decided to become a media magnate, one whose portfolio and power could exceed those of fabled predecessors like Hearst and Pulitzer.

Oracle, the tech company Mr Ellison co-founded and still controls after nearly half a century, is among the investors in the newly formulated American version of TikTok, the short video app that claims 170 million US users. Mr Ellison owns more than 40% of Oracle's stock and is its chief technology officer.

Many elements of the new TikTok remain unclear, including the exact ownership shares and who will run the company. About the only safe assumption is that the app will be controlled by people sympathetic to US President Donald Trump. The Murdoch family, the owners of Fox News, “probably” will be another investor, the president said last weekend in an interview on Fox News.

Congress had ordered the Chinese company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok for national security reasons, in a law whose enforcement was delayed by Trump.

With its remarkable appeal to young people, TikTok is quite a prize. Oracle already has a relationship with the app, using its cloud servers to handle US users' data. But this new deal could give it access to the consumer-facing side of the business. Oracle's biggest venture into a consumer business, the network computer in the 1990s, was a flop.