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Co-founder of Oracle and its chairman and CTO, one of its largest shareholders, with wide-ranging business interests in tech, media, and real estate.
Paramount closed its $111 billion purchase of all Warner Bros. Discovery assets on October 6 and renamed the merged company Skydance. Netflix bid only for the studios and streaming, so CNN now shares an owner with HBO Max and CBS.
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Larry Ellison cancelled a 50 million share trading plan one day after a filing revealed it, having sold nothing under it, and Oracle did not give a reason. The plan was written in June at a much higher price.
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David Ellison's Skydance closed its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery carrying roughly $80 billion of debt. The terms that cleared the deal leave staff and the overlap between HBO Max and Paramount+ as the likeliest sources of savings.
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About 100 tech billionaires added a record $845bn in the first nine months of 2026, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The gains sit in a few US fortunes tied to AI share prices, so they describe this year's stock market better than next year's AI spending.
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Paramount's settlement with 12 states won court approval on Sept. 30, clearing the last legal hurdle to its roughly $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal. The states' price is a consent decree adding at least $300 million a year of US film production spending, about 0.27% of the deal's value.
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Oracle shares fell more than 6% on Thursday after it sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl over Project Jupiter, its New Mexico AI data center. The notice protects Oracle's cash if the site runs late and makes its 2028 date the one lenders and investors now watch.
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Oracle's $988 million of options for Larry Ellison and his two co-CEOs carry strikes of $280 and $308, against a share price of $137. The 53% fall tracks a build that consumed $55.7 billion of capital and left free cash flow at minus $23.7 billion.
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Cryptobriefing reports Ellison plans to sell up to $7.5bn of Oracle stock while personally guaranteeing more than $40bn of media deals, with 277 to 346 million shares already pledged. At $150 that sale is 50 million shares.
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No shares changed hands, and the plan only became public because American filing rules require it. The facts that would have surfaced under any disclosure regime are Oracle's shrinking gross margins and a $2.8B charge for job cuts.
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The twelve attorneys general leave with two promises they will have to police themselves, and Free Press says parts of the deal ask less of Paramount than the two companies already do separately.
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California's Proposition 40 would take a one-time 5% of billionaire net worth, and at that rate the $29 billion Fortune estimates the measure loses to departures implies about $580 billion of net worth has already changed address.
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The company said in a filing that the money covers additional actions it expects to take. Roughly 92,000 of its 141,000 staff work outside the US, and collective cuts in the EU need consultation and written notice before anyone leaves.
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Oracle disclosed the plan on the 11th and said on the 12th that Ellison had terminated it. Priced off the $341.39 close the same account reports for the 10th, the 50 million shares come to $17.1 billion.
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Larry Ellison has skipped Oracle's earnings calls this year and is off next month's keynote billing. The product his successors have to explain is separated EU regions and borrowed data centre capacity.
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Larry Ellison filed a 10b5-1 plan on June 22 covering up to 50 million Oracle shares at about $175 each. The stock now trades near $150, and a plan that only sets price conditions may never fill by October 24.
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Oracle's AI growth story and its slipped data center date both sit with one co-CEO, Clay Magouyrk. The founder's two senior titles are unchanged, so what the October program settles is who sells Oracle.
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With 2,059 more US data centers planned and three-quarters of Americans opposed to having one near them, local consent is now the part of the buildout that committed capital cannot put on a calendar.
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Techdirt traces years of Oracle-funded attacks on Section 230 to a board seat at TikTok, where a 15% stake and a hosting contract put Oracle on the paying end of the legal weather it helped make.
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Twelve states sued to block the $111 billion Paramount-Warner deal. The reply travelling furthest is an Iowa op-ed that totals up the ticking fee while leaving the deal's economics to a promise about movie counts.
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Guidance 26 points above consensus is a procurement forecast wearing a demand forecast's clothes. The bottleneck ranking that buyers actually needed was the one thing withheld.
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