Larry Ellison and His Family, Explained | Vanity Fair

This is Flyboys, an otherwise unremarkable 2006 action movie, except for this one thing. It saw the debut of an actor named David Ellison. But it's not his performance that's notable. It's that a 23-year-old USC film school dropout at least partly paid for the film's unrecouped production budget. See, David is tech billionaire Larry Ellison's son, and 20 years later, with his family waiting in the wings, he's poised to take over a major pillar of Hollywood. That's movie producer David Ellison gaming out a potential deal to take charge of Paramount Global, bringing even more tech billions to our screens. You need to know the Ellisons, not just because they're rich, not just because they're princes of tech, but because they're becoming a major force in Hollywood. We'll explain. Larry Ellison, David's father, is among the world's richest people. Even if his large stock holdings make it hard to pinpoint just how rich he is, due to a recent hot streak in the stock market, Bloomberg pegged him at $168 billion on September 10th, 2024. Quartz had him at $192 billion on September 12th, and a day later, CNBC said he spiked at $208 billion. His net worth ballooned by $40 billion in two days by simply existing, briefly surpassing Jeff Bezos to become the world's second richest person. Of course, with great money comes great marketability. There are breathless fortune covers, a cameo in Iron Man 2, and an endless parade of headshots and society photos, sometimes with some new ingenue. But Larry Ellison didn't start rich. A great aunt and accountant uncle adopted Larry and raised him in a safe community in South Chicago, albeit too modest for Larry's taste. Even in his childhood, he was a nonconformist, ignoring class to read his own books and enrolling in at least two colleges before dropping out. In his 20s and early 30s, he struggled to pay off a big spending habit by working as a wandering programmer. But finally, in his 30s, Larry hit gold. The company he founded, which eventually became Oracle after its main product, started in 1977 after Larry and his two co-founders borrowed ideas from an IBM research paper and actually built them. The language they made solved a big problem. Old databases stored information but couldn't retrieve it well, but the so-called relational model put things in tables with built-in connections between data so you could get to it much faster. The CIA was Oracle's first contract, $50,000 in 1978, because spies, of course, need to keep track of large numbers of people. In fact, all levels of government do, which is still where a sizable chunk of Oracle's revenue comes from. Eleven out of its first 12 years, Oracle's sales doubled in size, continuing up to $50 billion in recent years as they expanded to cloud infrastructure and healthcare. Following the now-familiar model of other tech giants, grandiose Larry, a skilled, if disinterested programmer, was cast as the visionary. Stallwart Bob Miner was the builder. So Larry assumed this natural role as face and voice of the company. He could articulate why the world needed Oracle, and he was a visionary. Of course, he did the standard cheesy conferences in turtlenecks, too. As frontman, Larry also played bad boy, killing smaller competitors, riling up bigger ones, like his sometimes feud with his white whale, Bill Gates. Nothing's new. Microsoft continues to do what they always do, which is to keep the price of Windows high and copy other people's software and just add it to Windows. He could take things too far. Once, as part of an anti-monopoly trial, Oracle even paid private detectives to sift through the trash of allegedly pro-Microsoft lobbying groups for discrediting evidence. He also received heat for ditching his own keynote address at an Oracle conference, which people paid to attend, just to watch his boat in a race. But whatever his shenanigans, Larry was always forgiven, because the company had a stock that And he did all that with a relatively tiny buy-in. There are different figures floating around, but none are higher than $10,000. Contrary to Larry's humble beginnings, his kids grew up with privilege in the picturesque town of Woodside, California in the 1980s, mostly with their mom, Barbara, following her divorce from Larry when the kids were young. According to GQ, Larry was financially supportive, but not necessarily engaged until the children's teenage years. According to image-conscious David, Barbara tried to keep the kids fairly normal, with chores and a $5-a-week allowance. And they also had a relatable passion for movies, sitting around and watching their collection of tapes, even acting out the dialogue. Although, to be fair, their collection numbered 3,000. It's like that scene in Hot Fuzz. In fact, David often gushes about a revelatory moment in his life when he went to see Terminator 2 in theaters as an 8-year-old. More on that later. But dig underneath the veneer of normalcy, and you'll find that privilege. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Barbara had to step in to prevent Larry from taking David to a Boeing flight simulator in Seattle when David hadn't finished his homework. On vacation in Saint-Tropez, Megan would go out on speedboats, with the son of a billionaire Saudi prince. The kids also had these undeniably lavish hobbies, like Megan's equestrian or David's aerobatics. That's stunt flying. One of the more egregious stories was when Larry and a teenage David flew out in their own planes over the Pacific to do mock dogfighting. Outside of her equestrian wins, Megan's childhood is a little harder to see, but that's kind of characteristic of the most private Ellison. But following that early passion for movies, both kids found themselves drawn to Hollywood in college. And at least some of their startup cash came from their now-billionaire father. Hollywood has this old term, dumb money, reserved, often unfairly, for unwitting, affluent types who come to LA with a passion for movies. Hollywood takes their money, and they get screwed in the process. The most famous example is, perhaps, Howard Hughes, but the desire among those with immense wealth to reshape culture and leave a legacy hasn't gone anywhere. Modern examples include recognizable names like Sackler, known for their company's involvement in the opioid epidemic. Michael Sackler, an heir on the family's English side who was a minor when allegations arose, helped finance The Witch, for instance. There's the sense from some contemporary reports that some unscrupulous executives were drooling at the chance to fleece the Ellison kids. We don't know how much they had then, or now, but there are reports of stock transfers worth at least $306 million each. Whatever it was, it was enough for David to start his own production company four years after Flyboys went down in flames, an event that shook the younger Ellison so much he had a cardiac event after it. The new company was called Skydance, after his love of stunt flying. By raising an astonishing $350 million, he enticed Paramount into a four-year production deal. Remember, this was a USC dropout who'd basically only made one bad movie, but when you have both Steve Jobs and David Geffen as advisors and can leverage your very famous name to orchestrate investments, it's a different story. Both Ellison kids worked as executive producers on the $38 million Western True Grit, and there's this sense that it was sort of a test case for their taste level. It was a huge hit right out of the gate, totally upending the dumb money narrative. From then on, Skydance worked on heavy hitters, everything from Star Trek to Mission Impossible, and that's David's taste. He likes spectacle, and he's good at making it profitable. Inside, he's still the kid who went gaga over Terminator 2. And like a Terminator, he's very logical, data-oriented, dedicated, doesn't drink, likes explosions. But True Grit was Megan's springboard, too. Like the other Ellisons, she was a college dropout. Around that time, as she was rumored to have gained access to a billion-dollar trust fund, she founded a production company called Annapurna, named after the Himalayan peak. And while Annapurna didn't churn out blockbusters like Skydance did, Megan developed a reputation of her own. She was the artistic Ellison, the one with taste, the friend to directors, the devotee of Altman, the savior of quality mid-budget pictures. Although shy, she'd hang out with actors like Jessica Chastain and Jason Clarke in exotic locations, drinking gin and tonics on hotel rooftops. And she'd pay more, sometimes double, defying Hollywood wisdom on films from directors she liked like Paul Thomas Anderson. Yes, she's the Ellison kid who got a write-up in Vanity Fair. While she was still in her 20s, she won gold for Zero Dark Thirty, Her, and American Hustle. But unlike some other Hollywood nepo-babies, there's no sense that this early success went to David and Megan's head. Over the years, there are occasional mentions of David's Helicopter or the $30 million mansion Megan owned, but they're nowhere near the excess of some of their peers or their father. After all, this is a man that actually owns the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He owns it. He shared an 82-room yacht with music mogul David Geffen until he decided he needed his own. Even more extravagantly, he installed basketball courts on those yachts. Balls that go overboard are fished out by a trailing speedboat. It should be noted, though, that Larry gives wealth away, too. A lot of it is your typical billionaire-add-a-wing-on-a-hospital type of thing, but sometimes the causes are a bit more partisan. Controversially, Larry, who is Jewish and has close ties to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has donated to archaeological projects in East Jerusalem that critics say undermine Palestinian claims there. Especially in his old age, Larry has swerved to the right, hosting MAGA fundraisers, joining a conference call exploring the possibility of contesting former President Trump's 2020 election loss and touting a now-debunked anti-malarial drug to the president as a possible cure for COVID. Trump has reciprocated, describing Oracle as a great company and suggesting them as a preferred partner for purchasing TikTok. It's probably only fair to point out that Larry seems like a generous father, too, but he isn't always a passive investor. Back at Annapurna, when Meghan oversaw a failed move to get into film distribution, a series of high-profile flops, and even bigger passes on big films like Bombshell and Hustlers, Larry and team came in to oversee the studio's books. It might be unrelated, but soon thereafter Meghan reportedly came unravelled, vanishing from the company she founded. It was reportedly only the studio's acquisition of the Oscar-nominated Nimona that lured Meghan back and rejuvenated her. Their future slate includes more animated projects from the Nimona creators, plus video game adaptations spinning out from their award-winning gaming division Annapurna Interactive. But even that may be problematic since the entire gaming division, until recently a bright spot, quit en masse after failing to convince Ellison to let them spin off into an independent company. David has had some notable missteps. He hired animator John Lasseter despite accusations of sexual impropriety at Pixar, and sadly David's reboot of his beloved Terminator franchise didn't set the world on fire. But he's largely made wise decisions, including pivoting to streaming during the pandemic. So when it became known that Paramount was searching for buyers, David, who had that long history with the company, was waiting in the wings. He and investors announced an $8 billion deal that would give David the Paramount CEO spot, and depending on when this launches, it may have already gone through. But investor is key, because at 77.5%, Larry Ellison would actually be the single biggest shareholder in the new company. Accordingly, a filing by Skydance with the FCC would give Larry CBS's broadcast license. Everyone is still trying to figure out what this all means. Give us some sense as to where you really see the numbers adding up. Given David's taste, it'll probably mean more big, loud, and feel-good popcorn spectacles, although that might rankle fans of Paramount's golden years. But remember that the Ellisons made their money in tech. Media and analysts have framed them as tech people, not entertainment, and they've leaned into it. And what might be pertinent for folks in the industry who just finished striking over this is the Ellison's stance on AI. In some investor documents, David has touted artificial intelligence as something that would turbo-charge content creation. Although Larry hasn't weighed in directly thus far, he's certainly pro-AI, even gleefully imagining an AI-policed world that sounds like something out of Minority Report. The real question though is what happens if David fails? Will Larry step in to protect his investments like he did at Annapurna? Will he dictate policy, whether tech-related or otherwise? After all, Larry retired from his job as Oracle's CEO in 2014, but stayed on as CTO and chairman of the board. Even at 80, it's hard to believe he'll relax. It'd seem that the family is aware of the optics. Halfway through reporting, Skydance amended FCC filings to show that David now legally controls all of the Ellison's voting shares instead of Larry. Still, it's an interesting question. What happens when the world's most enigmatic tech billionaire is the power behind the throne? Can his kids step in to shape it in their own vision, or is that destined to fail?