Larry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle, is the second-richest billionaire in both the United States and the world and for a brief moment was number one in the world. But for a long time, unlike many of his peers, he was unable to boast that he controlled a chunk of the news and opinion reaching the American public.
On Forbes‘s US list, he is sandwiched between Elon Musk, number one, who bought the social media network Twitter and rebranded it as X, and Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos, at number four, has the Washington Post. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, numbers five and six, operate the leading search engine as well as one of the most important news aggregators, Google News. Michael Bloomberg, at number thirteen, the former New York City mayor, has Bloomberg and its various outlets.
Ellison seems to have joined the club, as TikTok, under US government coercion, is selling 80 percent of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, along with investment firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.
Ellison is a big Trumper, joining in the reactionary denial of the 2020 presidential elections. Like some of the others in the deal, he is part of the inner circle of Trump’s favorite corporate ideologues. This TikTok deal is not just about money. It’s about control of the political narrative.
But owning a big chunk of the United States’ leading short-form video platform is not Ellison’s only claim to being a media mogul. Eyeing the corporate media throne, you…
Auteur: Ari Paul
