The Mind of Larry Ellison w/ Tom Dotan

Introduction to Larry Ellison

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2:12CallZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

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2:32On August 17th, 1944, the Allied forces pushed Germany out of the south of France, and in the Bronx, a child was born that would go on to become one of the most leathery and ghoulish software orcs in the history of capitalism. I am, of course, talking about Archdemon and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and today I'm joined by Tom Dutan, a wonderful writer who just had a piece published about this vile old fart in Vanity Fair. Tom, how are you doing? I'm doing great, Ed. I really like that X-Men-style Magneto intro to Larry Ellison. Yeah, he's like Magneto, but he kind of attracts bad debt at the moment.

3:05I was about to say, yeah, exactly. His superpower is a magnet for debt. It's acquiring companies, because it's funny, having you on to talk about Oracle, this is one of my favorite and least favorite subjects, because I spent really the last like 10 months digging into this company here and there, but I'm mostly on the financial side. And the thing that keeps popping up is this is a very strange company. Like they have, I think they may be one of the most aggressive stock buyback companies in the world ever.

3:35Yes, yes, very much so. They've been doing it for, I can't stand up that particular superlative. We should look into it, but that's been- It's 190 billion or more since inception, which isn't the most that anyone's bought, but I think as a percentage of overall revenues and such, it's one of the highest ones. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a key part of their strategy as, you know, they've been basically using their excess cash to buy up stock and keep Larry Ellison further and further into control. I mean, that's been like a major part in why their stock has been able to be, you know, even relatively flat during the years that the company was basically floundering.

4:08So yeah, it's key.

Founding Oracle with the CIA

4:10Yeah, it's a strange company. So how did we get, what is the actual founding story of Oracle? Because I know that they, I've read vaguely that they worked with the CIA, but how'd this get going? All right. So basically what happens is Larry Ellison comes out to California in the 1960s. He's a college dropout, sort of a layabout bum, moves out to San Francisco with no real plan in mind. I think he's like a river guide or something in Yosemite for a couple of years, but he has a chip on his shoulder and dreams of being rich. This is extremely important to him from an early age.

4:41And he kind of falls in with the burgeoning Silicon Valley crowd of the era. So this is like a, you know, a cohort that produces Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak and Bill, sorry. And Larry is a self-taught programmer. He works for a couple of early, early days software companies. I'm not going to remember all of the names, but one of them has an internal project working for the CIA, providing a database. Basically, Larry is very into the plumbing and database side of things. Which was quite boring at the time, right?

5:12It wasn't really. Extremely boring, right? Yeah. I mean, you have people, sorry, what were you saying? No, just keep going. Yeah. So you have people like Steve Jobs who are interested in the proliferation of personal technology and Bill Gates, who's interested in, I guess, I don't know, licensing software, but more or less the same kind of consumer approach. And then Larry is taken by this concept of the relational database, which in very simplistic terms is basically about how you can connect one piece of data to another. And we're about to have an explosion of data as all these companies start collecting

5:45customer and other sort of specific data into these mainframes. And Larry makes this bet that databases are going to be the future of how businesses are run. And so he's working for this company and their first client or one of their biggest clients is the CIA. And the internal name for the project of the CIA software contract is Oracle. So that's where the name comes from. He leaves that company and then he starts his own. It doesn't, it isn't initially called Oracle, but years down the road, it does take that

6:16name. And their first client, the company that later becomes Oracle, their first client is the CIA. Nice. Okay. Right. Nice. So really like nice beginnings for this company then. And how did it grow? Was it through government services? Was it just because databases were actually a necessary tool? I think you could argue it was a great business at the time. I mean, someone needed to provide this service. There were about to be an explosion of kind of hyper targeted, not really targeted, but businesses were just trying to make sense of what they could do with the fact that technology

6:48was able to suck up transaction data or other specific things. And they were really the best game in town doing it or the most aggressive game in town. And Larry, to his credit, is a technologist. And he sort of understands the direction of where the Silicon Valley, you know, ecosystem is going. Databases are a huge part of it for a lot of years. And they were one of the most effective games in town. Also ruthless. You know, they have huge fights with Microsoft in the 90s. He and Bill Gates are tremendous enemies, later friends.

7:20What do they argue about? What are they getting at each other's throats over? Well, basically they were moving in on each other's business. You know, like Microsoft is, you know, Bill Gates is one of the most rapacious, competitive, insane people that, you know, the business world has ever produced. And Microsoft could only get so big just by selling Windows and, you know, office productivity tools to people. And then you have, you know, Larry Ellison, who wants to own all aspects of the customer relationship. And it was just straight up, you know, two competitors going at each other.

7:51But it was also very personal. Yeah, the whole industry also just has never really liked him. That's, this is not because Larry is, well, I mean, yeah, the answer is yes. But yeah, it seems that Larry has kind of pissed off just about everyone, including his customers over the years as well. Yeah.

Customer Lock-In and Software Margins

8:09I mean, Oracle is an infamously customer unfriendly company. It's sort of baked into their DNA is that they don't really give a shit about how much they can up chart their customers because they have complete lock-in from them. And I mean, we can talk about this if you're interested. But one of the interesting kind of diversions in, you know, the direction of software in Silicon Valley is that Mark Benioff is an early Larry Ellison acolyte. Oh, really? I actually didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, there were, you know, Benioff was really kind of the prodigy salesperson.

8:42He's a pure, I'm saying this in the nicest possible way. He's a salesman. He knows how to kind of pitch something in a compelling way to businesses. And, you know, he's obviously become this quasi cult like, you know, Hawaiian infused figure in Silicon Valley now. But the sort of genius, if you want to call it that of Salesforce, which is, you know, something that Oracle invests in and Larry and Mark have this on again, off again friendship is that what, what if we built a company that sold to other businesses that didn't hate them, what if we actually had, you know, at least the appearance of being concerned with

9:16their satisfaction with the product. As opposed to, I've heard Oracle referred to as a law firm with a software company attached. Yeah, absolutely brutal. Nobody really loves it. The software I hear works pretty well. Like I give them maybe some credit for the fact that no one has displaced them with maybe a better product. Well, I think that, well, I'd actually push back on that. It nearly, there's an Oracle story where they nearly bankrupted the town of Birmingham because of the amount of money they were spending on trying to fix Oracle.

9:47But I mean, this is kind of typical of the greater Silicon, we don't need to get too sidetracked, but it's kind of typical of the overall Silicon Valley experience at the moment. Yeah, yeah. And Oracle never really changes course. Like their, their guiding philosophy for many years is we own these customers on this particular aspect of the relationship. So why would we change what we're doing? You know, we have them by the, we have them by the balls. We can keep upcharging them. They're not going to be able to really go anywhere else because of vendor lock-in and it's not an amazing business, but it's a very solid one.

10:18And they're able to kind of, you know, make it through various upheavals in the tech industry, like the.com bust, you know, and the rise of cloud, which we can also talk about, but effectively they're just entrenched as part of the plumbing and it's a profitable software business. And that's like a pretty good place to be, but it's never been like a rip roaring company. Has it, but there's this kind of mythology I've heard, like, even in interviews with me where people say, Oh, they're one of the most profitable company. It's not necessarily true. It feels like they've just chugged along without dying.

10:49Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. Look, they have software margins, which is one of the great innovations of Silicon Valley is that you can basically with very little, you know, capital until recently, you know, capital expenditures charge people an annual basis on an annual basis for, for your product. And it's pretty cheap to do it. And Oracle is able to, you know, once they get their financial house in order, they have a real catastrophe in the early nineties because they, their books were just shit. They could not keep them together. And, and I mean, I don't honestly remember all the specifics of it, but the company nearly

11:23goes bankrupt. Um, because they have just not been properly accounting for their revenue. I think it's the easiest way to put it. I did not know that the nineties were crazy, man. Yeah. Yeah. Early nineties. I actually didn't know that Oracle nearly did that because there's so much, there's so many fun stories that happen with this company, but they mostly start in the two thousands in my experience. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I mean, look, the nineties were an odd era within tech generally. Um, but when you get to like the late nineties, the rise of.com, um, and, uh, you know,

11:57generally the way the internet is upending a lot of these businesses, you see a huge panic among, you know, all the entire cohort of Silicon Valley. But what Oracle basically does during this period is decided to just buy companies. They're not very innovative. They're not really developing new products and they go on this huge spending spree. They bring on, you know, this, this pretty clever banker, Safra cats, who I'm sure we're going to talk about. Safra cats. Yeah.

Acquisitions and Executive Fiascos

12:22Um, she, she comes in, she was a banker. She comes on to be their CFO and basically leads them through this years of, of, of acquisitions. And so they ended up buying sun microsystems, which was like very upsetting to a lot of people, uh, in, in the tech industry. Uh, people soft was a huge fiasco because they fought it and it became a hostile takeover situation. And when they acquired sun microsystems, they immediately fought, like it was like a couple months later filed a suit against Google claiming that its patents were infringed in

12:52like, yeah, I actually don't know that particular story, but sounds, sounds right. It sounds like Oracle. Well, actually, while I have you though, I want to tell my favorite Safra cat story, which I know I message you, but I need the listeners to hear. So yeah, let's do it in the, in late two thousands, Oracle hired this disgraced HP executive called Mark heard. And to kind of simmer down the story Mark heard had, it appears allegedly, et cetera, legal disclaimers repeatedly tried to use his position at HP as a senior executive to have sex with a former reality TV star, hired her for events, would get a little touchy feely, real gross

13:25piece of shit, get shit canned from HP. And by the way, the terms of the reasons are because he used HP's funds to do something that wasn't HP related versus the horniness of it all. Larry Ellison writes a letter to the New York times saying this was tantamount to Apple firing Steve jobs in the old days. And he'd go on to hire her as president. So a few years later in 2014, six hours before an announcement saying that he and Safra Katz would be co-CEOs of Oracle Katz turns to her and says, going to Adam Lashinsky of fortune that he would not live long enough to regret getting between Larry and her or

13:59attempting to unseat Larry five years later, her dies of cancer, making Katz the sole CEO of Oracle. And just to be clear, fuck Mark heard like, you don't have to agree with me, Tom, but I think there's a piece of shit. It's good. He's gone from the world. Fuck him. Nasty little pervert. Anyway, that's who Larry Ellison was backing. But back to Safra Katz. Yeah, no, no, listen. And like you said, Mark heard does die of cancer, which is tragically, if you were sympathetic to the guy, a big theme in Larry's life. A lot of the people that he's closest to do end up, do end up dying.

14:31But Safra Katz, you know, she comes in, she was a banker at, I'm fuck. I can't remember the name of the banker that she, the banker. We'll look it up real time. Yeah. We'll look it up. Yeah. So she's a banker. She comes in to basically manage this acquisition era of Oracle. We mentioned Sun Microsystems, which is effectively a bid to acquire the language Java. They buy PeopleSoft, which is incredibly messy. PeopleSoft fights it, becomes a hostile takeover situation. The Department of Justice gets involved, takes 18 months.

15:06They end up buying the company. They win. They fire a huge percentage of them. They go on to buy a couple of years later Cerner, which is a health tech, a health records company. And that was 2021, took on a bunch of debt, and has actually been kind of a catastrophic one because it was so expensive. Complete catastrophe. It's mostly a Larry Passion project, which we can also talk about. But yeah, those are the acquisition years of Oracle, which does keep the company growing to a degree, but their products don't really evolve in a very big way.

Missing the Cloud Boom

15:35And then in the next couple of years, cloud takes off. You have the cloud boom in the 2010s. And Larry is very dismissive of this technology. He calls it, basically, the tech industry is basically no different than women's fashion. He said it was gibberish.

15:54And it ends up really fucking the company for a period of time. I also can't get over that it's like women's fashion. First of all, this man has five divorces. He probably should know that there's real money in that. But on top of that, what the fuck is he talking about? Well, yeah, he just was flat out wrong. I mean, there's just no way around it. There's no debating, you know, what happened during this period because you have relative pipsuite companies like, you know, at least on this front, Amazon and Google and, you know, Microsoft is floundering during the Balmer years in this era.

16:25Being the huge winners of the hyperscale cloud computing world and Oracle, which by every means had the customer relationships, had the cash to be able to fund it, just fumbles it, fumbles it really, really badly. And so they lead the way for multi-trillion dollar companies to come out of this revolution. And Oracle is just kind of bumbling along, buying back its stock and squeezing its customers, its database customers. So it's like absolutely a dark period that, you know, Mark Hurd is the CEO and Safra Katz, you know, is, is, is alongside there. And they're just not a company people pay that close attention to until obviously the

17:01AI boom. So just so I'm clear, I just really want to like make sure I've got this clear.

Stock Buybacks and Personal Debt

17:06So they did from what I found, $190 billion of stock buybacks. And this allowed Larry Ellison to consolidate his shares because he would, he had massive, he has like 40 something percent of the company now. And that's up from what decade ago. And it's like 20 something. 20. I don't have the exact number in front of me, but yes, in the mid twenties and goes up to 40. I mean, it is as for a company that's worth $400 billion. I mean, you have, you know, huge ownership stakes and private companies, but for, for a $400 billion company that's publicly traded to have a single person owning 40% of its shares

17:40is, is almost unprecedented. You know, I was talking to an analyst who has been covering the company for decades and his line to me is like, it's basically a publicly traded private company with Larry in complete control. And that's crazy as well, because if you look at, if you look at the kind of revenue of Oracle adjusted for inflation, it's flat. I've looked this up myself and which is so crazy. And there's so many crazy things about it, but it's flat. And the company has been sinking tens of billions of dollars into buying back its shares, mostly

18:12mostly to benefit one leathery man and his large wet son. Yeah. More, more recently that, but I will to Oracle's defense, the cash that they spent buying back shares, it's, you could argue it's decently well spent. I mean, they were buying these shares that I don't remember the exact price, but let's say it's in like the twenties or thirties, you know, the stock is trading at 130, you know, 130, $140 now. There's other ways you can use this cash, obviously, but just on a pure financialization

18:45basis, I don't think that many people are upset, you know, that their cash was going toward buying back shares. It did prop up the stock. I mean, it propped up the stock, but that money could have also gone literally anywhere else. It also, it propped up the stock for one stockholder. I mean, we're just debating whether Larry Ellison is a good person, which we both know he is just kidding. Uh, but it's, I don't know. I just, everything I read about this company and this man is so peculiar because in your story, you mentioned as well, that he also has his kind of own private financial situations.

19:19Like he's, uh, from my count, he has what, at least 21 billion, if not more dollars in personal loans and yeah, I don't know the exact number, but the thing about Larry is to pay for his life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, Larry, like most, almost every billionaire out there doesn't actually spend his own money. You know, he doesn't sell off his shares. In fact, and again, we can talk about this. There was a very, very bizarre moment a couple of weeks back where it looked like Larry was potentially going to offload billions of dollars in Oracle shares, which he hasn't done in decades, uh, and ends up pulling it back a couple of days later.

19:51And I'm still trying to dig into what, what happened there. Cause it was very, very weird, but I mean, what from just to explain for the listeners. So a couple of weeks back, there was an announcement that Larry was going to dump nine, eight or $9 billion worth of shares. And then within one day, it was actually it was 7 billion. And then within one, one day, because everyone went, excuse me, what the fuck was that? Larry, what you, what you doing with those shares? Uh, they pulled it back and now he's doing another margin loan where he offers the shares up as collateral, which appears to be how he usually does business.

20:24Like Mad Larry doesn't tend to sell his shares. No, no, he's, he's, he's very much like many other billionaires uses his collateral to, you know, to, to get margin loans and fund his lifestyle and passion projects. And as I reported out in the story, there's a really interesting shareholder lawsuit that happens in the two thousands, where you actually get a glimpse at his, you know, internal finances and the tens of millions of dollars, uh, that he spends on, you know, his yachting excursions

20:56and everything to do with his yacht racing, his personal life, his real estate. I mean, the guy is one of the most prodigious holders of properties around the world. Um, yeah, he owns an island in Hawaii, owns an island, which I definitely would love to talk about, but, um, and his, his poor head of his family office, this guy named Philip Simon, who's kind of a, a beleaguered figure in the Larry Ellison universe. There are emails that come up in discovery and the shareholder lawsuit where you see Simon basically begging Larry to reign it in. He's like, we have, I think the term is the phrase is something like a, a freight train

21:29of debt, uh, headed toward us right now because of all of his spending. Um, and what was he spending that money on? Um, personal was the category, um, for, for a lot of this stuff. Um, so what kind of personal, what, what, well, look, I think boats, boats, boats, certainly boats, certainly boats and yachting and real estate, I would say are the easiest things to, to look to. Um, there's obviously the stuff as his children get older, uh, two of his children get older and become very interested in, well, he has seven of them now, but he has two from, he

22:05has two from his third marriage to Barbara Booth, who was a Oracle receptionist. Um, and that is Megan and David who are both very much figures in Hollywood. Um, and then he, with his sixth wife, Joel and Jew, he has five very young children who he had, uh, in his late seventies to early eighties. All right, everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts.

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25:51Learn more at chase.com slash getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, NA member, FDIC, subject to credit approval, offer subject to change. Terms apply. Damn, my man's fucking, I guess. I mean, that's the first time anyone said that on a podcast about Oracle. But I didn't know he had another elder child.

26:22Yes. We all know David. I know about David, Mr. Normal looking,

Hollywood Ambitions for His Children

26:28but I didn't know about Meg. Oh, Megan is fascinating to me. I actually, honestly, between you and me, Ed, I find her more interesting than David. She's the more kind of like Shakespearean figure of the two. So both of these guys want to go into Hollywood as they grow up. Larry is not involved in their life early, early days. He's always on the go making Oracle. And so one of the greatest Silicon Valley companies of all time. And later on, both Megan and David decide they want to be big time Hollywood producers and moguls. Megan is more interested in Oscar bait.

27:01She really likes kind of prestigious art films. And so she starts this company called Annapurna Pictures, which maybe you've heard of. I have not. Okay, okay. So they make a bunch of movies in the 2010s, like Zero Dark Thirty, The Master. She's very close with Catherine Bigelow and funds a lot of her movies. Detroit was one that was an Annapurna picture that was actually kind of disastrous for them. She owns the rights to the Terminator franchise. I actually didn't know that. I'm looking at the Wikipedia as we speak

27:33because I just learned that this person existed. This woman's actually been around a bit. She produced Zero Dark Thirty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy. Between the two of them, I think if you're a movie lover, you have a lot more respect for Megan because she's really making a go of it. She's actually made movies versus whatever it is that David Ellison did. David makes Tom Cruise movies, right? I mean, Skydance was making its name co-producing the later Mission Impossible movies

28:03and it makes Star Trek and things like that. Oh God, he actually produced Mission Impossible Fallout, which I liked.

28:11What are you going to do? I just feel like I stepped in something, Jesus Christ. So he was out of their life, but he just came back into it. Was he fully estranged or was he just off doing whatever it is he does all day? Yeah, I think more of the latter. I mean, he does have a relationship with them. There's a huge amount of guilt he feels over the fact that he wasn't there. And I really think... Larry Ellison feels guilt? Yeah. I mean, look, who's to say what lives inside the mind of a man? But I actually think if you look at the completely,

28:42I would argue, insane money that has gone into Skydance's buying spree in Hollywood and the likelihood of any of this turning up into a successful, you know, mega conglomerate media company, I think a good amount of it. And this is coming from friends of Larry's and people who've worked with him for decades say that like it's driven by what he says is like a, you know, paternal obligation to his children and a decent amount of guilt over sort of not being there in their early years. Because I admit, I've been trying to work out why...

29:15Because at this point, it's reasonable to argue that Larry Ellison is endangering his future with this Skydance deal that he had to... And with AI as well. And I mean, I really must be clear, I think this man is an evil gremlin. On a personal level here, not putting words in your mouth, I think he's a dark figure. I think he's connected with Netanyahu, like a really genuinely evil guy. Sure, sure. But it's straight... I was wondering why he would do something so illogical with this. And if the answer is he truly loves his big wet son,

29:46that's genuinely one of the funniest possible ways this could go. Because... I mean, but isn't that always the case? You know, with these billionaire scions? Like, not really. Like, I think that there are plenty of rich people who don't give a shit about their kids and would leave them on the floor screen. I mean, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, classic kind of a child lever. Like, the Behind the Bastards episode where we did, God, back when I started Better Off Live, it's like he refused to pay child support

30:17to the point that the California DA sued him. Yeah. So, I mean, weird that Larry Ellison is less of a deadbeat than Steve Jobs. Interesting. I'll put him on the ranking board. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these people, for whatever reason, contain layers. I don't want to come down one way or the other on whether or not Larry Ellison is a good or bad person. And the evidence on the bad side... I don't think it's possible to, but I already have. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm not here to convince you, but look, the Hollywood stuff, I think, is super fascinating right now because, and I'm just going to state it outright,

30:47and I make the case, report it out in my story, the man does not give a fuck about the movie industry and the entertainment industry. He never has. There are people in Silicon Valley who have. Steve Jobs, for example, he co-founds Pixar. He is very close with Bob Iger. He's someone who thinks a decent amount about the music industry. And even though he ends up kind of destroying it, this is a guy who cares about media. Larry never does. He doesn't even care about news. And everything that's going on now with Skydance and CBS News and now CNN,

31:17people are trying to attach to this Larry Ellison worldview and he's in the midst of a political project. I didn't find that in my reporting. I think it's a much more interesting story. Yep, go ahead. How did you come to the conclusion he, Larry Ellison, doesn't really care about it? Because I'm very curious about this. Well, look, let's put things, I'll be somewhat measured with this. The guy is increasingly conservative. He's very influenced by Elon Musk. He obviously is a huge supporter of the state of Israel

31:48and is close to Netanyahu. He has his biases. So the fact that CBS News is tilting, they say, towards the center, but obviously with Barry Weiss in there, it's pretty clear what's going on. I don't want to claim that that is not in any way a reflection of his politics. That said, the guy is not Rupert Murdoch. And I don't think, it's a huge mistake to think of him in that way. He's not a newsman. He's not sitting there saying, and now I will make my big wet son by CNN.

32:18And once my wet son has his hands around it, I will twist this to the pleasure of Donald Trump. You don't think that that's really what's driving him.

Political Connections and Media Views

32:26I think it's a tertiary, if not below, cause in what's going on here. Fascinating. I think with David, he believes he has a vision of turning, you know, this consolidated media company into, you know, a great competitor to Netflix and YouTube. And if we can just kind of stack all these brands together, we can really compete on scale. He's a Hollywood, he's like, he's a Tom Cruise movie guy. He doesn't care about news. I think this whole thing is a huge nuisance to him, frankly. Everything with Barry Weiss.

32:57And to be clear, though, they are obvious, they are definitely right-wing people. Like, just gotta be clear about this. But is this based on discussions with sources? Is this the kind of feeling you've got? Yeah, yeah. It is based on discussions with sources. Fascinating. No, I wasn't, to be clear, I wasn't questioning you. I'm like, I want people to hear this because there's a lot of anxiety, understandably, about the big wet son and his right-wing views and that this might be a kind of Elon Musk-style takeover when it sounds like it's a rich dad buying his wet son

33:29a big thing and his wet son wanting to be kind of a media magnet, almost. He wants to be big like his dad. I think he sees his billionaire dad having, you know... Oh, that's so sad. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, there's a fascinating moment, and this kind of ties a lot of different themes together. So Netanyahu is embroiled in scandal, obviously, never not, but there's a corruption scandal and investigation that's going on in Israel in 2015, 14 or so. And Larry is ensnared in this

34:00because there was a period of time... How was Larry Ellison ensnared in an Israeli corruption scandal? Yes, yes. Because he's close to Netanyahu. Safra Katz plays a very large part in that. She's an Israeli-American and extremely right-wing. No, you know, there's no shortage of evidence to see that she's someone who... Anyway, we can talk about Safra more if we want, but this Netanyahu situation, he tries to convince Larry to buy a newspaper that is run by one of his adversaries.

34:31I don't remember the exact name of the newspaper, but they're writing all this shit about Netanyahu, and he tries to get Larry to buy it for him and make it more favorable. And Larry basically tells him no. And Ellison, Larry tells the investigators, the Israeli investigators that are looking into this corruption, I told him no because I am a technology executive. I am not a media executive. I am not interested in that business. And so you see from, again, a relatively early stage in his kind of right-wing evolution,

35:02he doesn't believe in mainstream media. He thinks Twitter is the truth, the light, and the way. He gives a billion dollars to Elon. Is that a quote? No, no. That's, I think, what the Korean church used to say outside Los Angeles. I mean, you can see from the freeway. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, he's, no, but he believes that Twitter is the only source of truth. That is a more or less direct paraphrase from several sources. That's so fun. I love that. Yeah. So he's quite close with Musk, isn't he? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

35:32Elon's come out to Lanai several times. There is rumors, I have not corroborated them myself, that Larry brought Elon out to Lanai to help him get dry off ketamine. Can you imagine the conversations that those two have? Actually, one of the things, talking to conversations, Larry Ellison, the thing that always surprised me was he looks like he's going to be a little fella with a booming or gremlin-y voice, but he's six foot one and he sounds like this.

36:03Sounds very soft-spoken for the man I thought he'd be. Yeah, I don't know what to, his voice, I have talked to Larry once in my life and that does put me in relatively rare category. Yeah, I'm surprised he talks to journalists. He doesn't, he hasn't talked to journalists in a long time. There was a Forbes piece that came out during the pandemic where they talked about, you know, his, some of his health initiatives that he's very into and also they mentioned this farming initiative on Lanai, which I wrote about at the Wall Street Journal. He was trying to reinvent agriculture

36:34and create the Tesla of agriculture on Lanai. But anyway, I was doing, when I first joined the Wall Street Journal, I was doing a story on Benioff actually because there was a period in 22, 23 where there were all these activist investors that were piling into Salesforce trying to force this company to increase its margins and Benioff is sort of a master at manipulating the press or at least developing a kind of chummy relationship with them. And so, as I was doing this piece, Benioff basically weaponized

37:05his Rolodex to get all of his famous friends to call me and tell me how great of a guy he is. That's so funny. Yeah, yeah. No, in a probably 10 minute period of time, I got texts from Gavin Newsom and Yo-Yo Ma and he offered to introduce me to Jared Kushner. Yo-Yo Ma? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yo-Yo loves the billionaire set. He's a big Davos figure. I didn't know he was like, but that's also just, who else called, if you remember, or is it just those two? Michael Dell called me.

37:37Wow. Andy Jassy was supposed to call me, but they ended up just giving me a statement. I can't remember who else was on that list. I don't have those emails anymore since I left the journal, but it was classic Benioff. You know, he's a real, unlike Larry, you know, Mark really does like, you know, cavorting with that class of people and then developing relationships with them and, you know, doing each other favors. Well, let's say these days, but yeah, yeah, I get what you mean, but keep going. Anyway, so one of the people

38:07that he gets to call me is Larry and I took the call of like, I don't know, 5.30 p.m. on a weekday and the thing I was really struck by is the guy was probably 79 at the time. He sounds so young. I just couldn't believe that he was the age that he was. I mean, I don't know what to make of it. What does sounding young sound like? He doesn't have like a kind of gravelly sort of Tom White husky voice or the sort of,

38:38you know, you hear Rupert Murdoch kind of, you know, like when Murdoch talks, he kind of just sort of barks and grumbles and. Or the Dershowitzian kind of, yeah, he doesn't really, he looks like he should. He looks like he was born with it, but he, he has this kind of remarkably smooth kind of, he sounds like a, like a guy that would be like a children's social worker. Sure. Sure. Well, he has enough children to. Yeah, I guess, I guess that is part of the business, but you know what? Let's, let's change gears. I want to know about this

39:08goddamn island.

Owning and Managing Lanai

39:10Oh, Lanai, Lanai. I am fascinated by Lanai. I've been to Lanai three times, which is, a lot of times considering I've never once stayed at the Four Seasons, which is the main reason people go to Lanai. But, so Lanai is one of the larger islands in the chain of Hawaiian islands. It has been owned by one billionaire corporation or individual billionaires for the entirety of the 20th and 21st century. It's owned most prominently by the Dole Fruit Company, which turns it into the world's largest producer

39:40of pineapples. Dole gets bought out by private equity and this real estate magnate named David Murdoch who runs the island horribly for 25 years. It gets hugely in debt. He has to sell the island after the financial crisis in 2008 and Larry sort of comes through to buy this island and he's owned it since 2012 and it's a fascinating thing to go to a place that is, you know, in a modern American state

40:10a company town. But the fact is Larry and his holding company called Pulama Lanai own 98% of the island. So almost every single business pays rent to Larry. And are there residences there, I guess? There are some people who own their own homes and so they have private residences but by and large, you know, the largest employer on the island is Larry Ellison. And he owns both the Four Seasons that are there. There's a small boutique hotel called Hotel Lanai.

40:41He has built multiple houses and compounds for himself on the place. I wrote about this in the story but there's this most recent compound it took multiple years to build. He hires these Japanese carpenters who build it in the traditional joinery style. He houses them on the island. Yes, sure. He houses them on the island for a bunch of years while they're doing this. I mean, he runs it like, I think I wrote in the story that the previous owner of it, this guy David Murdoch, he kind of ran it like a, you'd imagine a billionaire kind of an arbitrary

41:11dictator, sometimes cruel, sometimes generous. Larry basically runs it like a god. I mean, he's so rich that if he decides that there needs to be a new housing complex to provide for the people there, he can basically make it happen. But that's, so is he well liked by the people of Lanai? This is going to be disappointing for you, Ed, but the answer is yes. Right. Tell me more. Yeah, I would say it's a reserved yes because the fact of the matter

41:42is, look, he's built housing for them, which is something that they need more of. He has built various amenities. He reopened a pool that the previous owner had closed. The most recent addition is this bowling alley that he, I think it was formerly a community center, that he was converted to a bowling alley.

42:02Again, aspects of his personal life kind of bleed into the infrastructure there, so he turned this dilapidated movie theater into what apparently is one of the nicest movie theaters in the country, largely to play the movies that his children are producing. I was going to say is this, yeah, this is line of, yeah, it's one of those things where there are benefits, but they're mostly ancillary to the larger thoughts of Ellison. It's hard to know where one, you know, ends and the other begins. You know, it's weird to say

42:33it could be worse than Larry Ellison, but that is not necessarily a saying, it's not saying he's amazing, but I'm not disappointed by it. It doesn't surprise me because, especially for an island, I imagine there's a certain degree of he does have to keep them pleased because at some point you're going to have to either turn that into a police state or appease people, which I'm surprised he didn't just do that. Well, I mean, the police state thing, I don't know. There's not too much police there

43:03to begin with. It is a very strange place. That's kind of what I'm getting at, though. I'm surprised he didn't just have like Larry force. Yeah, well, funny you bring that up because there's a pretty funny story from a couple of years back where, you know, Larry is always zipping around the island on his Corvette, his Stingray, this kind of bright orange car. You can Google it. And he actually got a ticket once. What? Yeah, yeah. Look that one up too. Hawaiian press was all over it. But some enterprising police officer saw a guy going, God knows how fast,

43:34on their very windy roads and they pull him over and they see that it's Ellison. And I think he gets the ticket and writes it. And I don't know what happened to that cop, but, you know, I guess there's some general belief in justice over there. Yeah, I mean, also, I think he can probably afford the ticket. What an interesting thing, because he is definitely an evil goblin ghoul man, but it seems that there are odd times where he's remarkably soft. This is not me trying to, case to the guy, he fucking sucks, but it's interesting how there are, like,

44:04kind of gradations of his evil and how he acts. Look, I mean, the fact is, and I was kind of worried when I was working on this story because that is a general perception of him among a certain class, is that the guy is the, you know, an embodiment of a certain type of billionaire asshole, evil, harmless, you know, even Steve Jobs at times found Larry's, you know, greed and fixation on money to be kind of off-putting. Hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Larry actually talks about this in a fairly decent commencement address that he gave to USC a couple of years ago,

44:36where Steve grabs him by the shoulders and he's like, there's more to life than money, Larry.

44:42And I don't really know how much Larry took that to heart. I mean, no, knowing every, no, the thing is, is it's like, Larry obviously has a horrible personality, has treated many people, his staff, the people that work with him, the people that work around him with contempt, he's treated the tech industry with contempt, his customers with contempt. So yeah, I imagine he's not unilaterally evil in everything he does. And I think that this is one of those situations where it's complex, but he's still like a bad guy, but of course there are going to be people

45:13he's nice to. Unlike Steve Jobs, who was just well known as being a piece of shit to everyone. Right. But the sense is that he contributed to society because of, you know, the technology and his focus on, you know, consumer electronics and, you know, it felt like it was this artist bestowing his gifts to us. Whereas Larry, it's like, he's just kind of known for being rich and into yachts and having lots of wives.

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49:53Terms apply. It's funny, both of them were kind of trying to do the same thing. Steve Jobs, mostly famous for stuff other people did. Larry Ellison, mostly famous for his company doing well because of buying stuff that other people did. So, with that being said, what is Oracle and what is Larry Ellison like right now? Like, what is the current state of everything in Ellison world?

Betting Oracle on AI Data Centers

50:21Yeah.

Betting Oracle on AI Data Centers

50:22I mean, there's so many parts of Ellison world, which is why I use this metaphor of the octopus to explain him and his ambitions, which I know is kind of more about the octopus, just the reader might not have read yet. Yeah, so that's sort of the structure of my piece. And I know it's kind of, there are people who might think of like, oh wow, brilliant observation to view, you know, a far-reaching power is tantamount to an octopus. But the fact is Larry is obsessed with this image and motif himself. He has multiple holding companies

50:52that are octopus themed. You know, his private equity-ish arm is called Cephalopod Corp. He has also Octopus Holdings itself. There's another arm called Tentacle Corp. And then his venture capital arm, which invests in Theranos, is called Paco. I really don't like this because of the octopus murders. Oh, tell me about those. Danny Casolaro, who was investigating something around something called the Promise software. It was famously, I don't even want to go into too much detail for fear of getting

51:22fucking killed. But yeah, I don't love that he's talking about the octopus and Promise software. And yeah, there's all sorts of bad stuff about that. Anyway, how normal? Keep going. Yeah, so he believes in kind of the far reaching-ness of his ambitions. And so at this current moment, you basically have the core of it, which is Oracle, which is bet the entire company on building AI data centers. They've transitioned themselves from being a fairly languid database provider into being

51:53a neocloud and taken on, as I'm sure you've talked about endlessly on your show, billions and billions of dollars of debt to build data centers effectively for one client in open AI, which may or may not have the ability to make good on its multi-hundred billion dollar contract. And it's a $300 billion contract over five years. The data center capacity doesn't exist yet. All that good stuff. Right, right. Yes. And building these data centers have been a total pain in the ass. It's not gone particularly smoothly as most data center builds at this speed go. So I don't want to

52:24single them out more so than CoreWeave and any number of people that are, you know, at this break net pace to build a capacity for, you know, a small number of frontier labs. But basically they've taken on a huge amount of debt to do that. They also own 15% of TikTok, which is a transaction that is, you know, transverse three administrations or two presidents, but Trump won Biden and Trump too. So they are the cloud computing provider and holder of the algorithm for TikTok. There's all the stuff that's going

52:54on with his son David and then there's his relationship with Trump and how he's kind of tried to find himself politically in this period. But as I'm sure you've mentioned multiple times on your show and I get to in the story, it's all built on debt. Yeah, this is a company that has taken on unprecedented nearly unprecedented amounts of debt to fund almost every aspect of Larry's ambitions. It has taken Oracle, which was a, as we've said, pretty decent company and turned its cash flow negative in order to

53:25handle all the capital expenditures. And look, if it pays off, it is, you know, kind of an incredible last stage act for this entrepreneur in his 80s to take this middling company at this point and turn it into one of the great winners of the AI boom and kind of rectify the wrongs of missing out on the cloud computing revolution. But if it doesn't work, I mean, they will be the poster child of the AI bust. There's no question. I'm not even sure how financially they make it out of it.

53:55I know, and this is me talking, it's not in the story, but these data centers they're building for OpenAI are all, they're all project financing with most of them being non-recourse, but one or two of them Oracle be on the hook for. It's just unclear how they work it out if this doesn't work out. Like, what the fuck do they do? Because there's not really another business, is there? Well, I mean, other than the existing ones. Yeah, there is the existing businesses. I haven't really gamed out what it would look like if Oracle, and basically

54:27what this means is that OpenAI has imploded, right? If OpenAI is no longer able to fund the data centers that they have signed a contract to do. Yeah, well, right. If for whatever reason, you know, the spread gets too large and the debt is so onerous that they would never even make money on, you know, the contracts that Oracle would pay out for them, I guess they would just have, you know, massive, massive layoffs to a point that the company is a shell of its former self and is basically exists to service its existing debt. I don't know. I mean, I can't

54:58honestly think outside of like the financial collapse, an analog to what Oracle would look like if this whole thing falls apart. And yeah. Go on, go on. Well, I'm just saying I want to be somewhat measured here in the fact that like a lot of things have to go wrong simultaneously and in order for this to be the reality of things. I mean, as it stands now, they have debt that they are currently paying off. The company does have existing businesses that are underwriting it.

55:28And, you know, they're certainly not the only neocloud that's taken on debt in order to fund data center expansion. And so I don't, you know, I don't quite see the domino effects playing out right now to I mean, not right now. I do have to push back on that because even though they are not the core weave level, I mean, they don't have 15% bonds currently trading at the level, but here's the thing. Oracle can't really

55:59service the debt long term with their current cash flows. If the revenues don't grow with it, it'll absorb it. But the thing is, it's not just, oh, can they afford the debt? It's they're going to have bill if they succeed 300, 400 billion dollars worth of capacity. And there's no buyer in the world that can actually afford it, including OpenAI now. So, I mean, the natural answer is I think the minimum is what you said about them being the poster child. For the destruction of all of this capital, but I truly don't, I think that there's a

56:30future where Oracle shatters, where they have to sell it, which leads me to my funniest outcome, which is I think that if this doesn't work out, and I think it's a certainty you can disagree, that's fine, but if that's the case, isn't Larry Ellison quite on the hook for a bunch of margin loans? Like if Oracle stock crashes?

56:51Yeah, I mean, just going down the road of the funniest possible outcome, having the eighth richest person in the world getting margin called is very funny, is very dark and funny. I agree. I think that that might be the best possible outcome. And so, as we wrap up here, anything about the story I've left out, anything particularly funny or weird that we haven't talked about? I mean, I spent a lot of time looking into his personal life, which we talked a bit about his children, but, you know,

57:22the man is on his sixth wife right now.

Financial Risks and Margin Loans

57:26How, so, so just to quickly run through his wives, you know, two happen as Oracle sort of on its way up. He divorces them. They have strange relationships with him. Still relatively good. You have his, his third wife, who is the parent of David and Megan, his fourth wife, Melanie Kraft, who is, was a romance novelist. And they were together for a number of years. She wrote a book about a billionaire, not clear if it was based on him.

57:57His fifth wife is a Ukrainian model. And then his current wife, Jo Lin Zhu, who is born and raised in China. She went to school here, I think high school and the University of Michigan. There is a very funny story, in my opinion, in the Wall Street Journal recently about the fact that this woman is apparently kind of shadow managing their football program.

58:20Largely through Larry's money. But he, and this kind of gets to why I was, isn't that the one where Larry Ellison also massively boosted a generational bust? Well, I, has that guy been a bust? I actually broke the story with my colleagues when I was at the Wall Street Journal about the fact that they were major donors to an alumni group that was able to recruit away this high school quarterback that had committed to LSU. And then they were able to lure him over to Michigan. Has he been a bust there? I'm not a college football guy. Yeah, Bryce Underwood has apparently not been very

58:51good, but I haven't checked recently. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean. They're sticking with him despite the issues, which is a great way of, which is mostly how Oracle's customers feel. Yeah. Yeah. Or you could even look at, you know, what's going to be the bigger bust, Bryce Underwood or their data center. But, but Jesus, this, this kid is, he's, I feel bad talking shit on what is a child, but this was, this wasn't, this is, this is not looking so good. He's ranked 102nd in passing yards and tied 100th with five

59:23touchdowns and 70th QBR. Not great. That's, that's rough. That's really rough. Well, I don't, again, I also don't want to shit on the kid. Yeah. I, I couldn't do what I would scream. I would die the moment I got tackled once by a varsity high school player. So I'm not going to. Yeah, no, no, I'm with you. But, you know, he, he, he exists at the University of Michigan by the grace of, of, of Larry and his wife, Jolin. And, you know, Larry is in this constant pursuit for connection in my interpretation of his

59:53personality and talking to his friends. I think he's obsessed with the woman that he's with at the time is the way he explained it to a couple of sources, you know, he's extremely committed to someone and then he kind of just falls out of love and, and that almost immediately ends things with them. And I look at someone like him and, you know, we live in the age of, of billionaires. I know it's kind of a banal statement, but we kind of, as the country becomes more and more oligarchic, we, we kind of just look to our billionaire

1:00:24overlords and, and try to read the tea leaves of what it is they want. Cause they're basically going to be directing the future of this country. And, you know, Larry, I find to just be a mysterious figure who is obsessed with his legacy. You know, he's reached this point where almost all of his friends have died. You know, he's involved in so many different aspects, media and technology and politics. I don't know how much he cares individually about all these things. And at the same time, he's reading, you know, constantly reading biographies about

1:00:55Napoleon and Winston Churchill. And, you know, as some sources mentioned to me, puts himself up in that league of person and kind of aspires to be this world historical figure. But it's also kind of a very long, yeah, basically through Oracle and I don't know his wives, but you know, I don't know where, if someone like that ever finds peace in his life and where contentment comes from. And just as like a profile subject, I was fascinated by it. So I, you know, in one sense, you see this world spanning

1:01:25ambition of, you know, being at the center of all of these different transformations. At the same time, it's like he seems kind of like a lonely guy. And I hope people find in him as much interest as I did because he really is of the richest people, you know, kind of a mystery and someone who people haven't written much about. And I feel like, you know, even though this piece was thousands of words long, I could have written so much more because I just don't know if I've gotten to the core of him yet. It's fascinating to see him as

1:01:56because like I'm, I'm pre-facing this by saying I think he's the scum of the earth. I've written probably 25,000 words about Oracle. I'll probably have another 10,000, 15,000 in me before the company dies. I, it's fascinating hearing and actually kind of statistically enjoying it, watching these people struggle with living. Like they have all this money. They don't struggle with anything real in life. They don't have mortgage bit. Well, I guess he does, but they don't have like actual existential threats. So he's sitting around reading

1:02:26fucking books about Napoleon. Yeah. And being like, I'm damn, I'm white Napoleon. Look at me. And it's so funny because you'd think that the big company and all the money in the Hawaiian Island and the five, six wives and the 79 children and the media empire would be enough. But it's very obvious. Nothing is enough for him, which is, I realize kind of a banal statement, but it seems like he didn't, because I know he tried to be a yachter. He tried to go out on his yacht

1:02:58and that didn't work out. Well, the yacht thing is actually an interesting story on its own because I think he is pretty successful in yachting. I mean, the Oracle, yeah, you know, he, with his Oracle team and the BMW team or something, I can't remember how the sponsorships worked out. They do win the America's Cup two times, which if you care about that sort of thing, you know, like that's, that's really complicated. But didn't he try and say it? Wasn't he trying to be a sailor himself?

Yachting and the Search for Acceptance

1:03:23Yeah. Yeah.

Yachting and the Search for Acceptance

1:03:24And he is on the yachts. But that didn't work out. Some of the times, well, you know, there's this very kind of harrowing moment in his life in the, in the late nineties, he participates in the Sydney to Hobart open ocean yachting race. And it was this catastrophe where all the yachts went into a hurricane, a literal hurricane. Um, and, and several of the sailors died and, you know, Larry's crew on the, the Sayonara, I believe was their yacht. Uh, by the way, Lachlan Murdoch was a, was a participant on that, um, on that race. He was on the yacht anyway, they win that race, but Larry is completely freaked the fuck out after all of that.

1:03:55He, he, he looks death in the eye and is like, yeah, I'm not doing this anymore. And so he gets into, uh, America's cup racing, which is kind of more of a Harbor racing yachting thing. And, um, they're pretty successful. They win a couple of times and then they lose. And then Larry gets into a protracted legal fight with the America's cup. Uh, and then he basically tells them to go fuck themselves. And he starts his only called sail GP, which is dedicated essentially to the destruction of, of America's cup. Um, that said from what people in the yachting community tell me, you know, he actually was fairly forward thinking about

1:04:26the future of these hydrofoiling catamarans or whatever they, they race. And so I actually think there is a ton of respect he has within certain circles of the yachting community, but to get back to like, you know, the, the emptiness of the core of this person and the search for acceptance, he still, as I understand, attends the America's cup races. Um, he's largely rejected by this very waspy community of people who view him as, you know, I don't know, gauche new money or whatever. Wait, the waspy. Wait, wait, that's amazing. So other rich people reject

1:04:57him. This is my understanding. Yeah. The New York yacht club never really likes the guy. And so, you know, yeah. And so the America's cup still goes on, you know, they, they do it every couple of years. And Larry, as I understand it still attends this thing, but as a participant, and I talked to a source who was actually on Larry's yacht during one of the, one of the last races. And he was like, I was looking at the guy watching him watch this race that he had spent untold amounts of his fortune, trying to be a winner in and being accepted

1:05:27by, and he was just rejected by it. And you have this sort of solitary billionaire figure, one of the richest people to ever exist, looking at this community that he wanted to be accepted by and, you know, taken on as its champion, just sort of rejecting him. And, you know, that's kind of where he's at. It's so funny because he's just, it seems like he's in a decades long existential crisis. Yeah, I think that's right. Certainly when you marry a Ukrainian model in your, in your late sixties and seventies, you have to sort of question where, you know, what kind of

1:05:58a, I mean, that's like 50% of marriages over 50 in England. So that's fair. I, I would love to pretend like I'm kidding. I've known one other person who's done that. Wouldn't say I love the person, but, um, nevertheless of England, by the way, Ed, I know we've gone way long. Oh yeah. Tony Blair. Yeah. Yeah. He's very close to Tony Blair. He's a single, he's single single-handedly bankrolls the Tony Blair Institute, which is this, you know, NGO. What the fuck is the Tony Blair Institute? God fucking damn. I leave England. And anyway, we could probably

1:06:30do an episode just of the Tony Blair Institute. I'd like to know more about it myself, but as I understand it, it's basically this NGO that has these techno-optimist solutions for African governments, um, largely pushing software to solve all their problems, including Oracle software, maybe probably. Right. And so he's very close to Tony Blair. He actually brought Tony out to Lanai once and was showing off the hydroponic greenhouses that he had built there and nearly fed Larry, uh, nearly fed Tony a, uh, pesticide laced tomato, uh, that he claimed as

1:07:00organic. Um, but anyway, in England, there's a whole bunch going on now that I didn't even have a chance to get to in my story, which is that he's building up an entire health Institute at Oxford, buying up all kinds of buildings, uh, during his, this is part of his search for the cure to cancer. And, um, he, uh, evidently bought a pub that was once the favorite pub for CS Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Sorry, just to be clear, Blair or Ellison? Larry Ellison. He owns a fucking pub in London. Jesus fuck.

1:07:31Yeah, I think it's in Oxford, but yes, it was apparently the pub. Yeah. The pub for, uh, for, uh, CS Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And this really pissed people off, uh, the fact that Larry bought this pub. I love that. What I love about that. Thank you, by the way, is to wrap up, this has been one of my favorite episodes because we still, like Larry Ellison's still an evil gremlin goblin ghoul man, but it sounds like he's just struggling to try and find meaning in the world. Like he's, like he's, um,

1:08:02reminds me of Mr. Frog from Smiling Friends. The listeners, email me if you've watched that, where it's just like, he's done everything and nothing scratches the itch. Almost makes me think the open AI thing is just like a, nah, fuck it. Just, I've heard a few, a few sources I've talked to about Ellison have just been like, eh, he's old, he's fucking trying it. Yeah. Just going for it. And how interested he is in, you know, the data center stuff. He's not very hands-on with it. You know, I've talked to a lot of people who've been out in Abilene, you know, building this shit and, you know, Clay McGorick and those

1:08:33types are all extremely involved. Larry is sort of this ghostly specter that hangs over the whole project and people there are joking about the fact that like, we know we can't afford this shit. How are we going to pay for it? It's like, yeah, Uncle Larry will cover it. Um, so, you know, I, I think he really cares about his legacy. And if you think about the legacy of this company that you founded, and he's like the last of the Silicon Valley Titans, that's still actually involved in the running of his company to a degree, how do you want to go out as like the database provider that kind of just ambled along

1:09:04for a bunch of years until it was, I don't know, bought out by private equity or merged into some other, you know, conglomerate or the ones that like fucking went for it and like took on all the fucking debt and became one of the greatest, you know, we were able to avenge the losses of us not being a great cloud computing company. I mean, when you have that much money and you're that old and you're that much in control, these are the ways you think. Tom, it's been such a pleasure having you. You've been listening to Better Offline. Tom, I'll put the link to your, your story in the notes. Tom's an excellent writer. He's also done some of the best stuff in AI

1:09:34economics. You've been listening to Better Offline. Tom, thank you for joining us. Thanks so much, Ed. This was great. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or

1:10:06visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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