Smash Notes

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

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. Tom Dotan then says Oracle's cloud computing business hosts TikTok's algorithm and is responsible for the security of the algorithm, and calls that a good business to have a piece of. When TikTok in the US came up during the first Trump administration, Microsoft wanted a piece of TikTok. For a time, Walmart and Oracle were going to own TikTok together. Tom Dotan says there are legitimate business reasons to want a piece of TikTok.

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 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.
  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.

People

More answers like this

More with Kevin Roose

More with Larry Ellison

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.