13/09/2025

BIZ & FINANCE SATURDAY | SEPT 13, 2025

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Ellison back on top, 48 years after Oracle’s birth

SAN FRANCISCO: Fortune magazine wondered on its cover whether Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison might become the world’s richest person, while BusinessWeek declared Ellison is “cool again,” noting that “Silicon Valley’s bad boy is having his revenge.” Both were published 25 years ago, but they could’ve run this week. The octogenarian Ellison is back in headlines after Oracle announced a clutch of cloud computing deals that rocked the tech world and sent its stock up 35.9%, putting Ellison’s fortune close to US$400 billion (RM1.7 trillion), second globally only to Elon Musk. Then on Thursday, news broke that Paramount, the media conglomerate Ellison’s family now controls, is preparing a bid to buy out the storied Warner Bros Discovery, threatening overnight to dominate Hollywood and culture. The swashbuckling billionaire may have been known more for his yacht collection, his ownership of a Hawaiian island or his longstanding support of Donald Trump. More recently, with little fanfare, he has plotted his way back to the centre of power. At Paramount, his son David appears to be tilting CBS News towards the right, tapping Trump supporter and former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute Kenneth Weinstein as ombudsman for CBS News. He also is reportedly considering The Free Press’ Bari Weiss for a leadership role at the news organisation.

o Cloud deals, Hollywood moves and an AI gamble push billionaire’s fortune near US$400b, second only to Musk

and announced a splashy half a trillion dollars OpenAI computing project Stargate. Oracle’s first cloud venture in 2016 ended in business disaster but a second, launched in 2018, was a service that proved cheaper and more flexible than other offerings. In 2020, when Zoom Technologies was buckling under a crush of new traffic during the pandemic, it tapped Oracle’s cloud and its hiccups and outages all but vanished. In 2022, when TikTok moved the data of more than 100 million US users to Oracle’s cloud, the changeover went largely unnoticed by users. Analysts called this a major technical feat.

courting customers including Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI in addition to its new biggest client OpenAI. That shift has helped booked revenue surge more than four-fold to US$455 billion. “People have definitely questioned him over the years,” said Matthew Durot, deputy editor for wealth at Forbes, which calculates his fortune. With Oracle’s focus on AI, “He’s sort of got the last laugh – at least for now.” One key decision helped: Oracle chose not to build custom AI chips like Microsoft, Amazon and Google. The decision to instead rely on Nvidia has likely helped it get more chips from the global leader of AI processors, analysts said. Ellison himself led the way. At a dinner in 2024, Ellison took Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Nobu, his Palo Alto sushi restaurant. “Please take our money,” Ellison said he told Huang. “It worked,” Ellison added in an earnings call with equity analysts. Within several months of that sushi dinner, Oracle landed more GPUs, closed a compute deal with OpenAI marquee

Massive, AI-level money was more elusive until the latest quarter, when the cloud deals juiced Oracle’s stock price. Oracle vanquished database rivals in the 1990s, then missed nearly a decade of the sales and stock market gains from the wholesale shift of business applications to the cloud. While AI shows tremendous promise for Oracle, success is far from certain, given that the entire industry is still working on a profitable business model. Also, Oracle has tied itself particularly closely to a single company – OpenAI, which, according to a person familiar with the matter, is committed to paying Oracle US$300 billion for computing resources over five years. Oracle became an AI landlord,

Ellison has also got his hands on TikTok. In 2022, Oracle began providing US tech infrastructure to the short video-sharing platform after national security questions arose over the Chinese-owned service used by over 170 million Americans. Some probably have forgotten that Ellison’s brash tactics and lavish lifestyles earned him the role of bad boy of Silicon Valley since he co founded Oracle in 1977. In 2010, he played himself in Iron Man 2. Remarkably, Ellison has honed a reputation as a uber tech titan and playboy while tackling decidedly unsexy, vexingly hard computing challenges. Recently, he helped figure out how to string together thousands of computers to run artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Oracle does not buy land, build data centres or power plants. It outsources all those functions to partners, who may or may not come through, said Chirag Dekate, a vice president and analyst at research firm Gartner. It also remains to be seen whether partners such as OpenAI can amass the capital to pay Oracle, since OpenAI is still building a business it hopes will be profitable. – Reuters Gemini prices IPO above range, raising US$425m NEW YORK: Cryptocurrency firm Gemini Space Station raised US$425 million (RM1.8 billion) in an initial public offering (IPO) on Thursday, pricing its stock above a marketed range. The company led by the billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss sold around 15.2 million shares for US$28 apiece, after marketing them for US$24 to US$26, it said in a statement, confirming an earlier report by Reuters. The IPO values Gemini at US$3.33 billion on a non-diluted basis, according to a Reuters calculation. The price range was lifted earlier this week from US$17 to US$19, underscoring robust investor demand. New York City-based Gemini had capped IPO proceeds at US$425 million, in a rare move, even as the offering drew orders more than 20 times the shares available, Reuters reported earlier in the day. Record high prices for digital assets and regulatory wins have transformed the once beleaguered sector into an anchor for the IPO market, which has resumed a long-awaited recovery this fall after US tariffs delayed listing plans in April. Nasdaq had committed to a US$50 million investment in a private placement at the time of the IPO. Reuters was the first to report on the investment. Gemini begun trading on Nasdaq yesterday under the ticker “GEMI”. Crypto listings are gathering momentum. Stablecoin issuer Figure Technology raised US$787.5 million in an upsized US IPO on Wednesday. Earlier this year, CoinDesk owner Bullish and stablecoin issuer Circle both enlarged their offerings. The Securities and Exchange Commission under President Donald Trump has eased oversight of the crypto sector, which has frequently seen ventures from entities connected to him and his family. – Reuters

Microsoft, OpenAI strike non-binding restructuring deal SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft and OpenAI said on Thursday they have signed a non-binding deal for new relationship terms that would allow OpenAI to proceed to restructure itself into a for-profit company, marking a new phase of the most high-profile partnerships to fund the ChatGPT frenzy. Details on the new commercial

arrangements were not disclosed, but the companies said they were working to finalise terms of a definitive agreement. This marks a step forward in OpenAI’s prolonged talks with Microsoft as the former seeks to raise capital under a more common governance structure and eventually go public to fund artificial intelligence (AI) development. Microsoft invested US$1 billion (RM4.2 billion) in OpenAI in 2019 and another US$10 billion at the beginning of 2023. Under their previous agreement, Microsoft had exclusive rights to sell OpenAI’s software tools through its Azure cloud computing platform and had preferred access to the startup’s technology. Microsoft was once designated as OpenAI’s sole compute provider, though it lessened its grip this year to allow OpenAI to pursue its own data centre project Stargate, including signing US$300 billion worth of long-term contracts with Oracle, as well as another cloud deal with Google. As OpenAI’s revenue grows into the billions, it is seeking a more conventional corporate structure and partnerships with additional cloud providers to expand sales and secure the computing capacity needed to

Duo behind ChatGPT enters new phase, balancing cloud partnerships, capital needs, and control of AI’s future. – UNSPLASH PIX meet demand.

of OpenAI Microsoft will own, nor whether Microsoft will retain exclusive access to OpenAI’s latest models and technology. Regulatory hurdles remain for OpenAI, as attorneys general in California and Delaware need to approve OpenAI’s new structure. The company hopes to complete the conversion by year’s end, or risk losing billions in funding tied to that timeline. Microsoft and OpenAI compete on products ranging from consumer chatbots to AI tools for businesses. Microsoft has also been working on developing its own AI models to reduce its dependence on OpenAI’s technologies. – Reuters

Microsoft, meanwhile, wants continued access to OpenAI’s technology even if OpenAI declares its models have reached humanlike intelligence – a milestone that would end the current partnership under existing terms. OpenAI said under current terms, its nonprofit arm will receive more than US$100 billion – about 20% of the US$500 billion valuation it is seeking in private markets – making it one of the most well-funded nonprofits, according to a memo from Bret Taylor, chairman of OpenAI’s current nonprofit board. The companies did not disclose how much

Apple Watch hypertension tool approved, rollout next week BENGALURU: Apple will roll out a hypertension detection feature on its smartwatch next week after receiving US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance on Thursday, Bloomberg News reported. monitor in its latest Apple Watch at the Sept 9 event, where it also introduced a refreshed iPhone lineup, including a slimmer iPhone Air. The feature, pending regulatory approval, will not detect every case of high blood pressure, but could alert about a million people, Apple said. Available in 150 countries, the tool will use Apple and the FDA did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. The company unveiled a blood pressure

data from the watch’s optical heart sensor to track how a user’s blood vessels respond to heartbeats over 30 days, the report said, citing Apple. The feature will be available on the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, Series 11 and its more expensive Ultra 2 and Ultra 3 smartwatches, Bloomberg News said. – Reuters