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Back to Larry Ellison’s Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI’s Biggest Gamble, with Kevin Roose & Larry Ellison.

Why Can David Ellison Spend Larry Ellison's Money on Media?

David Ellison wanted to combine traditional media companies and scale them to compete with Netflix, Amazon, or YouTube. David Ellison had the money to try because of his father. Redbird is involved and the deal uses a huge amount of debt, but the money is Larry's.

The piece suggests Larry Ellison did not spend much time raising his first two children and tried to make up for it by bankrolling them in Hollywood. Annapurna Studios made well-respected movies and was a financial disaster. Larry Ellison is now doing the same bankrolling for David Ellison. Larry Ellison is not a media person, and Larry Ellison has conflicted feelings about how involved he was with his children.

Transcript

Larry Ellison’s Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI’s Biggest Gamble ·

Channels with Peter Kafka

More from this episode

  1. How Does Peter Kafka Describe the Media Empire Larry Ellison Bought for David Ellison?Peter Kafka opens the episode by calling Larry Ellison an 82-year-old billionaire and one of the 10 richest men in the world.
  2. Why Don't Larry Ellison's Media Buys Form One Plan?A grand plan would be easier to understand.
  3. Why Does Oracle Want to Host the TikTok Algorithm?Peter Kafka says Oracle sells technology to other technology companies, which is a way for Oracle to be involved with TikTok.
  4. Why Is a Direct pro-Israel Tilt of TikTok Hard to Pin on Oracle's 15% Stake?Oracle owns 15% of TikTok. The stake is no larger than the stake held by Silver Lake or by Andreessen Horowitz. ByteDance keeps a huge stake.
  5. How Did Larry Ellison Drop From Richest to Eighth?Oracle's value shot up last fall during an AI boomlet and made Larry Ellison briefly the richest man in the world.
  6. Why Were Believers in a Human-level System Treated as Fringe Weirdos in San Francisco?Ten years ago, when the book starts, there was no such thing as real AI.
  7. Why Is Kevin Launching Machine Gods After Leaving the New York Times?The new podcast with NPR is called Machine Gods. It begins the week of October 19th and will cover the week's news plus interviews with people in the industry.
  8. Why Does a Ten Percent Chance of Catastrophe Make Kevin an Optimist in San Francisco?Kevin usually puts the probability that it all goes super bad at about ten percent. In most of the world that sounds crazy.

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