How Trump May Make Ellison The Next Media Magnate

FOR DECADES, LARRY ELLISON revelled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time.

- DAVID STREITFELD & THEODORE SCHLEIFER San Francisco/Washington, April 2

He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, California, bought the 6th-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 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 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% 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".