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  • emptywheelemptywheel.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy
    Jul 31, 2026, 3:19 PM

    Here's how the beginning of the (very long) article pitches Ellison as a cautionary tale, the personification of the AI bubble, possibly about to burst.

    Ellison did cash in, at least at first. He signed the Stargate deal with Altman, putting him in business with the hottest young executive in the A.I. industry. He opened one of the world’s largest data centers in Malaysia, which has provided by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s A.I. computing power, and developed plans to build another one in the United Arab Emirates. Oracle became a major investor in the U.S. division of the social media app TikTok. Ellison also moved into a whole new realm of influence. In 2024, he backed his son David’s $8 billion bid for Paramount, the owner of a major Hollywood studio as well as CBS News. And in 2025, he helped finance David’s $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of a far bigger studio, dozens of cable channels and CNN. The Ellisons appeared to be building a very new sort of tech and media empire for the A.I. age, and Ellison’s wealth was soaring. Last September, he briefly became the richest person in the world. But his big bet on A.I. was built on an astronomical amount of debt in every imaginable form — bonds, letters of credit, asset-backed securities — available in seemingly unlimited quantities, because the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. It held that advancements in A.I. were directly tied to the generation of unprecedented amounts of computing power to process unprecedented volumes of data. Reaching the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., when computers match or surpass human thinking at any task, was going to require bigger data centers and a lot more of them. It all came down to capital expenditures — capex, in the lingo of the Valley. Whoever controlled the most computing power would control the A.I. economy. But lately, some investors and analysts have started questioning the scaling hypothesis or at least asking if all this spending is sustainable. The …
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  • emptywheelemptywheel.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy
    Jul 31, 2026, 3:20 PM

    But the middle is full of all these details about what truly absurd people these are, like his mystery partner a third of his age.

    Ellison was living on Lanai with Keren Zhu, a Chinese national who came to the United States as a teenager and who goes by Jolin. Very little is known about her, including whether she and Ellison are married. But people who lived on Lanai and worked for Ellison told us that he and Jolin had their first child when she was about 23 and he was about 70 — before Ellison was divorced from his fifth wife, Nikita Kahn, in 2020 — and that they have since had at least three more. Ellison appears to be attentive to Jolin’s desires. When she complained about missing authentic Chinese food, he had one of the island’s local spots, the Lanai City Bar and Grill, which he also owns, temporarily converted into a Sichuan restaurant. Image Larry Ellison, wearing a black V-neck sweater, sitting with a woman with long dark hair wearing a striped sweater and a white University of Michigan cap. Ellison with his partner, Keren Zhu, at a tennis match at Indian Wells in 2018.Credit...Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
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