Oracle, Silver Lake consortium to control 80% stake in TikTok in US, WSJ reports

[Celerity]

2. Larry Ellison (Oracle) is assembling a huge RW media (msm/social/entertainment, etc) complex that will dwarf Murdoch

https://prospect.org/culture/2025-09-12-proposed-media-empire-runs-on-ai/



For a moment, Larry Ellison was the world’s richest man this week. His share of Oracle stock surged close to $90 billion in one day after the company announced major cloud computing contracts with Nvidia and OpenAI, bringing total “performance obligations” to over $455 billion. Incidentally, Oracle revenues were actually under target, but the money you make now appears to matter less than the money you might make later. Oracle is also the technology backbone of the much-hyped but never-delivered Stargate Project of data center clusters; OpenAI is also a partner there. In other words, just sprinkle the words “AI” and “data centers” around and you too can add almost nine figures to your fortune in a day.

Ellison is one of the more reclusive oligarchs, content to own entire islands in Hawaii rather than be outspoken about politics. But he’s a major Republican donor, close to Donald Trump and on board with MAGA. He’s just quieter about it than some of his Silicon Valley conservative cohorts.

Only a small piece of the Ellison fortune, currently estimated at around $383 billion, was used to fund Larry’s son David’s pretensions to Hollywood grandeur. David, the head of Skydance, bought Paramount after a protracted courtship—and after Trump administration pressure in the merger approval process, cut off a piece of the action for the president in settling a frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes—and is in the midst of showing Stephen Colbert the door and transforming the venerable CBS News into yet another conservative bastion. Ellison now may expand that empire; he’s preparing a mostly cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the studio up the road from Paramount in Burbank.



Warner Bros. Discovery is currently the parent company of CNN; that network would fall into a sphere of influence at Paramount, where right-wing blog owner Bari Weiss is about to be handed a leadership role in the news department and the head of the conservative Hudson Institute is the new ombudsman. After decades of keeping its right-wing politics behind the scenes, the Ellison family apparently wants to emulate Rupert Murdoch, only with more resources and, if the Warner Bros. deal goes through, a potentially bigger megaphone.

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