MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tech billionaire Larry Ellison and his family are poised to establish a media dynasty. In the past few months, Ellison and his son, David, have taken control of CBS News. President Trump tapped them to run TikTok, and they're set to make a bid for CNN's parent company. NPR's Bobby Allyn looks at Larry Ellison's rise from cloud storage exec to soon-to-be media mogul.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Oracle is one of those tech companies that people often wonder, what exactly do they do again? Just ask George Polisner. He's a former Oracle executive.
GEORGE POLISNER: Earlier in my career, when I would tell people I was working for Oracle, they would go, oh, you know, the toothbrush company. And I would say, you know, not Oral-B, Oracle (laughter).
ALLYN: Oracle's not in the toothbrush business, but to some, it's about just as exciting. They run the back end of the internet, hosting massive amounts of data in the cloud, helping governments, militaries, hospitals and private companies make sense of the data. The data-hungry AI era has meant big business for Oracle. Here's Larry Ellison talking to investors last year.
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LARRY ELLISON: You say, I really want to use AI. I want to take full advantage of AI. Well, you can't do it unless you get your data in order.
ALLYN: Since the AI boom, Oracle has seen its stock price more than double. That has sent the personal wealth of Larry Ellison soaring. He briefly knocked Elon Musk off the top spot as the world's richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which adds to his showy and flamboyant nature. Ellison, who is 81, owns nearly an entire Hawaiian island. He's a competitive yacht racer, and he owns a fighter jet. Former Oracle executive Polisner says Ellison was like this even before he became a confidant of President Trump.
POLISNER: I think Larry is an iconoclast. He's always been known as a swashbuckling visionary in many respects. He has, I think, an incredible appetite for access to power.
ALLYN: After November 2020, court records show Ellison was on a call with Trump supporters, sharing ideas about how to undermine the result of the election. From that point on, Ellison has gotten closer and closer with Trump, which has helped win government approval for the Ellisons of Paramount Global, gave Oracle a leg up in the TikTok deal and they hope gives them an advantage in a future bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Michael Socolow, a media historian at the University of Maine, says controlling a dominant social media platform and a television network could give the Ellisons even more sway than the Murdoch family.
MICHAEL SOCOLOW: The potential to persuade Americans if you own CBS News, TikTok and CNN at one point is incredible, and I think it's historically unprecedented.
ALLYN: Now the question is, when the deals are done, will Larry Ellison and his son, David, move CBS, CNN and TikTok to the right? Analysts I spoke to say, it's possible, but it'll be balanced against not alienating each media company's existing audience. What's unquestionable, though, is that those deals are a big data play, says former Oracle executive Polisner.
POLISNER: He may be looking primarily at the value of the data and advertising revenue from harvesting that data.
ALLYN: The Ellisons didn't return requests for comment but in remarks to investors last year, Larry Ellison fantasized about a society in which all things are under surveillance at all times and that Oracle would be the steward of all the data.
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ELLISON: The police will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
ALLYN: The Ellison family's expected hold on media and entertainment data has drawn comparisons to how Vanderbilts owned railroads and the Rockefellers controlled standard oil. But in the attention economy, that digital data could be even more valuable than railroads and oil.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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