The CEOs of Everything
On January 21, the day after his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump walked into the White House’s Roosevelt Room tailed by three billionaires. He was announcing a major AI initiative, and offered warm words for the technologists beside him: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank; and Larry Ellison, executive chairman of Oracle. “That’s a massive group of talent, and money,” Trump said. He saved his most lavish praise for Ellison, whose gifts went “way beyond technology,” he said—he’s “sort of CEO of everything.”
Trump might have been referring to how Oracle, cofounded by Ellison in 1977, has become a key provider of the cloud infrastructure that enables AI—for which its share price has skyrocketed this year. But if you take into account Larry’s son David Ellison, the title “CEO of everything” takes on a prophetic quality. In July, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, approved an eight-billion-dollar merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, owner of CBS. The deal made David Ellison chief executive of a new media giant, Paramount Skydance. This month, the Ellisons made bids to take charge of another media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO, and Comedy Central. And then there’s the plan for American investors including Larry Ellison to take over US operations of TikTok.
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