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So, Larry Ellison is buying TikTok.
Let that sink in for a second. Larry Ellison, the 81-year-old software titan, the guy who owns a Hawaiian island and a professional sailing league, is about to get his hands on the app that determines what dance challenge your 15-year-old niece is doing this week.
He’s not alone, of course. The deal, blessed by President Trump himself, ropes in a whole cast of the usual suspects: Michael Dell, Lachlan Murdoch. Trump called them “great American patriots.”
Give me a break.
Let’s translate that from political-speak. “Patriots” is the new code for “rich guys I like.” This isn't about saving America from the Chinese data boogeyman. This is a leveraged buyout of youth culture by the geriatric plutocracy. It’s a handful of billionaires, whose combined age could probably get them a senior discount at the dawn of time, deciding they should own the digital playground of hundreds of millions of people.
That ain't patriotism; it's a hostile takeover of the zeitgeist.
So, an 81-Year-Old Is Buying the Off-Switch for Your Brain?
The Richest Man in the Room (Who Isn't Elon)
I have to admit, the scale of the money here is just… obscene. People talk about the `Elon Musk net worth` being stratospheric at $470 billion, making him the `richest man in the world`. But `Larry Ellison net worth` is sitting at a cool $349 billion. He’s the silver medalist in the global wealth Olympics, and his fortune jumped by $157 billion in 2025 alone. One good day for `Oracle stock` briefly made him the `richest person in the world`.
Think about that. One guy made more in a year than the GDP of a medium-sized country. He owns 41% of Oracle, a company with a market cap knocking on a trillion dollars. He owns 98% of Lana’i. He threw a reported $2 billion at Elon Musk’s vanity project to buy Twitter. And now he’s coming for TikTok.
Why? Does he even use the app? Can you picture Larry Ellison, age 81, scrolling through GRWM videos and skits about terrible first dates? Offcourse not. This is an asset. It’s a data hose. It’s a direct pipeline into the brains of the next generation, and he wants the keys.
The whole thing feels pre-cooked, like they decided who gets the prize and then worked backwards, and honestly—
It’s exactly what Mark Cuban was talking about. On his podcast, he called the whole process "scary" because there was no "open auction." This wasn't a competition; it was a coronation. And Cuban nailed the central, terrifying point: "Whoever controls the algorithm controls your thoughts."
That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame.
Who Asked the Industrial Plumbers to Run the Art Gallery?
New Cooks, Terrible Soup
The success of TikTok isn't the videos. It's the algorithm. The uncanny, borderline-telepathic "For You Page" that knows you have a weirdly specific interest in 18th-century naval history, vintage synthesizers, and golden retriever puppies. It’s a finely tuned machine for capturing and holding attention.
Now, who’s taking over the kitchen? The guy who runs Oracle.
Do you even know `what is Oracle`? I’ll tell you. It's a company that sells databases and cloud infrastructure to other giant, boring companies. It’s the digital equivalent of industrial plumbing. It’s powerful, it’s essential, but it has all the cultural cachet of a server farm in Delaware.
This is a bad fit. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of a fit. Bringing in the `Oracle CEO` and the `Oracle Larry Ellison` mindset to run a creative, chaotic, Gen-Z-driven platform is like asking a tax attorney to headline a music festival. They might technically know how the stage is constructed, but they have absolutely no idea what music to play. Cuban’s quote is perfect: "When you bring in new cooks, the soup might just get destroyed."
And it’s not just Larry. His son, `David Ellison`, the guy behind the Skydance-`Paramount` merger, might be involved too. It’s a family affair. The Ellisons are building a media empire, snapping up studios and social networks, consolidating power under one name. It’s all so… feudal.
My own Instagram feed is already a graveyard of ads for tactical pants and AI-generated art. It's become unusable. I can only imagine what the Oracle-fication of TikTok will look like. Get ready for sponsored "synergy" challenges and cross-promotions with the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
Then again, what do I know? I'm just a guy typing this on a laptop that’s probably running on some Oracle database somewhere. `Larry Ellison 2025` has been a banner year for him. Maybe these guys are playing a different game, one so far above the rest of us that we can’t even see the board. Maybe this is a genius move.
But I doubt it. It feels less like a stroke of genius and more like a bunch of rich guys saw a shiny toy they didn't understand and just had to have it.
Same Rich Guys, Different App
Let’s be real. This was never about national security. If it were, the platform would be firewalled or regulated, not handed over to a different set of billionaires. This is about control. It’s about taking the one truly disruptive, unpredictable cultural force of the last decade and putting it in a cage owned by the same people who own everything else. The `Larry Ellison Trump` handshake is just the public ceremony for a private transfer of power. We’re not getting a new, safer, “American” TikTok. We’re getting OracleTok. And I promise you, it’s going to suck.
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