Larry Ellison, Oracle’s Jewish founder and major pro-Israel donor, has been in the news lately for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
A new investigation into the family has uncovered decades-old details about Mr. Ellison. A superyacht was renamed after realizing the original name had anti-Semitic overtones.
In 1999, Ellison, then No. 23 on Forbes’ list of the richest people and now No. 4, bought a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, this 191-foot superyacht is named after a Shinto god. But Ellison soon realized that if you read the name backwards, “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two gods who, according to legend, created the Japanese archipelago,” Ellison wrote in his 2013 biography “Soft War.” “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backwards, I had no choice but to explain Shinto to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter or rename the boat.” He renamed the boat the Ronin and later sold it.
This week, a decades-old fact resurfaced. Profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, by New York MagazineChairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, founded by David Ellison in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger with Paramount Global last year. Meanwhile, Larry Ellison has joined a consortium of investors that struck a deal to buy TikTok, the social media giant accused of spreading anti-Semitism. Father and son also worked together to make a hostile bid to buy Warner Bros., but lost out to Netflix.
After taking over Paramount, David Ellison appointed Free Press founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, supporting Weiss’ contrarian, pro-Israel views that had been challenged as being overly friendly by the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish household by Jewish adoptive parents, has donated to pro-Israel and Jewish causes over the years, including Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest person.
In December, Oracle signed a deal to provide cloud services to TikTok, but some supporters had hoped for stricter protections against anti-Semitism on the social media platform.