• Bill Gates confirmed he's dating philanthropist Paula Hurd following his divorce from Melinda French Gates in 2021.
• Hurd, the widow of late Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, has worked in sales and service leadership roles in her career.
• The Microsoft cofounder also mentioned Paula Hurd in the acknowledgments section of his new book, "Source Code."

Bill Gates has confirmed he's seeing someone after his divorce four years ago.

The Microsoft cofounder, who was previously married to Melinda French Gates for 27 years until 2021, said on "The Today Show" on Tuesday that he's "lucky to have a serious girlfriend named Paula."

"We're having fun, going to the Olympics and lots of great things," he added.

Gates' girlfriend, Paula Hurd, was formerly married to the late Mark Hurd, whose career included tenures as the CEO of Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. They share two children and were married for nearly 30 years until Mark's death in 2019.

Hurd got her bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. During her career, she held various sales and services leadership roles at NCR Corporation and, in her final position at the company, was its vice president of services, heading up a team managing global strategic partnerships, according to her bio from Baylor University.

Hurd and her late husband, a Baylor alum, made several notable donations to the university, including leading the funding of its new welcome center, which was named the Mark and Paula Hurd Welcome Center.

"Our family is absolutely thrilled with the Hurd Welcome Center," Paula Hurd said in a 2023 ribbon-cutting ceremony. "When we made this gift, Mark had a vision for how a welcome experience could transform this corner of campus, and the outcome has by far exceeded our expectations and dreams. I know he would be proud of not only what has been built but the way in which others in the Baylor Family rallied around the Give Light Campaign to generate more than $1.39 billion in gifts to support the University he loved."

Hurd, who is a member of Baylor's Board of Regents, is also chairperson of the Universal Tennis Foundation, for which she sponsors annual awards for college players transitioning to professional tennis.

Hurd and Gates share a love of tennis. Gates has played with tennis pros, including Rafael Nadal and Andre Agassi, in charity games and previously told Business Insider that his pandemic routine included socially distanced tennis.

Gates and Hurd were publicly spotted together as early as 2022, when they attended the Laver Cup tennis tournament together. They also watched a tennis match at the Australian Open in January 2023. Also that year, Gates accompanied Hurd to a ceremony at Baylor officially opening the university's new welcome center.

Gates and Hurd made their red carpet debut in April at the 2024 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony. As Gates mentioned in his "Today Show" interview, they attended the 2024 Paris Olympics together as well. Representatives for Gates and Hurd did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Gates also included Hurd in the acknowledgments of his new memoir, "Source Code," which came out this month.

"Early readers of the manuscript included Paula Hurd, Marc St. John, and Sheila Gulati. The close read from dear and trusted friends provided much-needed thoughtful and insightful feedback at critical stages in the writing," he wrote.

• There's an astonishing amount of news coming out of the tech world right now.
• This week, it's DeepSeek. Before that, it was the TikTok ban-then-maybe-sale, huge infrastructure deals, and, of course, Trump.
• I wanted an insider's view on Silicon Valley's hopes and fears, so I talked to The Information's founder, Jessica Lessin.

This week's news about DeepSeek — the Chinese-built AI engine that's supposedly just as powerful as top-of-the-line stuff out of the US but built at a fraction of the cost — shook Silicon Valley and beyond.

But that's just one of a series of issues roiling tech. The big difference: At the moment, DeepSeek isn't intertwined with Donald Trump.

Just about everything else in the tech world right now seems deeply enmeshed with Trump 2.0 — from a potential forced sale of TikTok to the parade of the most powerful CEOs in the world aligning themselves with the new president.

I wanted to get a view of all this from the Bay Area, so I turned to Jessica Lessin, the deeply sourced journalist who has been covering tech for decades — first at The Wall Street Journal and now at The Information, the publication she founded in 2013.

We had what podcasters like to call a "wide-ranging conversation" that went in all sorts of directions, and you can listen to the whole thing on my "Channels" show. Here's an edited excerpt, focusing on DeepSeek's reverberations and the swirl around TikTok.

The DeepSeek news is still shaking Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and people are still sorting out what it means. What is your takeaway?

I think what's happening here is that DeepSeek is striking at a question that is so important: What is the comparative advantage that businesses can have around AI, and where is the money going to be made over the very long term?

We've seen extraordinary growth, extraordinary products coming out of AI. Everyone says we're in early innings, and we are. And so how is this technology going to advance? How easy is it going to be for others to build great models, and what great businesses are going to be built? I've been feeling like that's an open question for many, many months. And I feel like what happened with DeepSeek is — everyone kind of realized, "Wow, this is still a very open question."

Over the last year, there was a conventional wisdom jelling that said the AI winners are going to be the biggest technology companies — the ones that can afford all the chips, all the engineers, all the enormous power these things use. This has upended everything. It's been fascinating to watch the Wall Street reaction.

I think what Wall Street is doing is in some way actually like a meme moment. Not to get too meta here, but DeepSeek kind of had that feeling: The model's been out for a while. They released another model. All of a sudden, Marc Andreessen and Bill Gurley are tweeting about it. It captures Silicon Valley's imagination-slash-paranoia. And so I think Wall Street did what Wall Street does, which is sort of have blunt reactions on all fronts.

You guys had a story, which I assume contributed to the panic, reporting that Meta had spun up war rooms to figure out what they were going to do about DeepSeek. You can imagine Wall Street seeing a story like that coming from your publication and thinking: "Mark Zuckerberg is worried about this. We should be worried about this."

I just think Wall Street is still trying to figure out what to make of AI in general. We are just days after major infrastructure announcements that investors of all stripes are trying to digest. Now we have this evidence that, you know, it may be easier to catch up. So I think so much remains to be seen. But to your earlier point, I still think the largest companies have a lot to gain with AI because they have the distribution; they have the existing business lines that can be turbocharged with it. I don't think that's changed with this announcement.

Donald Trump says he's going to find a non-Chinese buyer for some or all of TikTok. What's your best bet on who that will be?

I go back to the last time this came around [in 2020], and the conversations were furthest along with the consortium that included Microsoft, Walmart, and Oracle. TikTok is strategically valuable to these Big Tech companies because it's one of the largest customers in the world of cloud computing, AI chips, data centers, and so forth. So I sort of believe — and know, to some degree — all of those entities are back at the table. And, you know, you can't count out Elon Musk.

It's surprising how quiet he is about all of that.

It's surprising.

He bought Twitter and, in many ways, it hasn't worked out. You could argue that it has worked for him in other ways. But TikTok is way more influential than Twitter ever was or could be.

Out of his many challenges, selling Teslas with Full Self-Driving capabilities in China is near the top of the list. He is not allowed to do it. It's hurting his position in the China market, which is essential. And so he's looking for every bargaining chip possible. I think his relationship with Trump has been driven in part by this need to negotiate with China. So I think that's important context here. And I'm sure that, like any good businessman, he'd be trying to use this to his advantage. I think we're going to have to just play this out a little bit and see what happens. And all options are still on the table. I mean, you could also have the Chinese government just saying, no way.

Tech leaders are embracing Trump very publicly. How much of that is because they want to get something from him, and how much of it is because they're afraid of angering him?

I think the story is a little more complicated than just wanting to be in his good graces. I think Silicon Valley senses there is a moment to unwind many policies — ranging from tax law to DEI — of the last several years. So tech leaders are really taking this moment. They are aligned with Trump on many issues. They're taking this moment to try and seize that, to get their companies back to where they want them to be.

• DeepSeek, a Chinese open-source AI firm, is taking over the discussion in tech circles.
• Tech stocks, especially Nvidia, plunged Monday.
• Companies leading the AI boom could be in for a reset as DeepSeek upends the status quo.

DeepSeek, a Chinese company with AI models that compete with OpenAI's at a fraction of the cost, is generating almost as many takes as tokens.

Across Silicon Valley, executives, investors, and employees debated the implications of such efficient models. Some called into question the trillions of dollars being spent on AI infrastructure since DeepSeek says its models were trained for a relative pittance.

"This is insane!!!!" Aravind Srinivas, CEO of startup Perplexity AI, wrote in response to a post on X noting that DeepSeek models are cheaper and better than some of OpenAI's latest offerings.

The takes on DeepSeek's implications are coming fast and hot. Here are eight of the most common.

Take 1: Generative AI adoption will explode

"Jevons paradox strikes again!" Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted on X Monday morning. "As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of."

The idea that as tech improves, whether smarter, cheaper, or both, it will only bring in exponentially more demand is based on a 19th-century economic principle. In this case, the barrier to entry for companies looking to dip their toe into AI has been high. Cheaper tools could encourage more experimentation and further the technology faster.

"Similar to Llama, it lowers the barriers to adoption, enabling more businesses to accelerate AI use cases and move them into production." Umesh Padval, managing director at Thomvest Ventures told Business Insider.

That said, even if AI grows faster than ever, that doesn't necessarily mean the trillions of investments that have flooded the space will pay off.

Take 2: DeepSeek broke the prevailing wisdom about the cost of AI

"DeepSeek seems to have broken the assumption that you need a lot of capital to train cutting-edge models," Debarghya Das, an investor at Menlo Ventures told BI.

The price of DeepSeek's open-source model is competitive — 20 to 40 times cheaper to use than comparable models from OpenAI, according to Bernstein analysts.

The exact cost of building DeepSeek models is hotly debated. The research paper from DeepSeek explaining its V3 model lists a training cost of $5.6 million — a harrowingly low number for other providers of foundation models.

However, the same paper says that the "aforementioned costs include only the official training of DeepSeek-V3, excluding the costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, or data." So the $5 million figure is only part of the equation.

The tech ecosystem is also reacting strongly to the implication that DeepSeek's state-of-the-art model architecture will be cheaper to run.

"This breakthrough slashes computational demands, enabling lower fees — and putting pressure on industry titans like Microsoft and Google to justify their premium pricing," Kenneth Lamont, principal at Morningstar, wrote in a note on Monday.

He went on to remind investors that with early-stage technology, assuming the winners are set is folly.

"Mega-trends rarely unfold as expected, and today's dominant players might not be tomorrow's winners," Lamont wrote.

Dmitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer at Perplexity, a big consumer of compute and existing models, concurred that Big Tech players would need to rethink their numbers.

"It certainly challenges the margin structure that maybe they were selling to investors," Shevelenko told BI. "But in terms of accelerating the development of these technologies, this is a good thing." Perplexity has added DeepSeek's models to its platform.

Take 3: Considering a switch to DeepSeek

On Monday, several platforms that provide AI models for businesses— Groq and Liquid.AI to name two — added DeepSeek's models to their offerings.

On Amazon's internal Slack, one person posted a meme suggesting that developers might drop Anthropic's Claude AI model in favor of DeepSeek's offerings. The post included an image of the Claude model crossed out.

"Friendship ended with Claude. Now DeepSeek is my best friend." the person wrote, according to a screenshot of the post seen by BI, which got more than 60 emoji reactions from colleagues.

Amazon has invested billions of dollars in Anthropic. The cloud giant also provides access to Claude models via its Amazon Web Service platform. And some AWS customers are asking for DeepSeek, BI has exclusively reported.

"We are always listening to customers to bring the latest emerging and popular models to AWS," an Amazon spokesperson said, while noting that customers can access some DeepSeek-related products on AWS right now through tools such as Bedrock.

"We expect to see many more models like this — both large and small, proprietary and open-source — excel at different tasks," the Amazon spokesperson added. "This is why the majority of Amazon Bedrock customers use multiple models to meet their unique needs and why we remain focused on providing our customers with choice — so they can easily experiment and integrate the best models for their specific needs into their applications."

Switching costs for companies creating their own products on top of foundation models are relatively low, which is generating a lot of questions as to whether DeepSeek will overtake other models from Meta, Anthropic, or OpenAI in popularity with enterprises. (It's already number one in Apple's app store.)

DeepSeek, however, is owned by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer and the same security concerns haunting TikTok may eventually apply to DeepSeek.

"While open-source models like DeepSeek present exciting opportunities, enterprises—especially in regulated industries—may hesitate to adopt Chinese-origin models due to concerns about training data transparency, privacy, and security," Padval said.

Security concerns aside, the software companies that sell APIs to businesses have been adding DeepSeek throughout Monday.

Take 4: Infrastructure players could take a hit

Infrastructure-as-a-service companies, such as Oracle, Digital Ocean, and Microsoft could be in a precarious position should more efficient AI models rule in the future.

"The sheer efficiency of DeepSeek's pre and post training framework (if true) raises the question as to whether or not global hyperscalers and governments, that have and intend to continue to invest significant capex dollars into AI infrastructure, may pause to consider the innovative methodologies that have come to light with DeepSeek's research," wrote Stifel analysts.

If the same quantity of work requires less compute, those selling only compute could suffer, Barclays analysts wrote.

"With the increased uncertainty, we could see share price pressure amongst all three," according to the analysts.

Microsoft and Digital Ocean declined to comment. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Take 5: Scaling isn't dead, it's just moved

For months, AI luminaries, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have been predicting a big shift in AI from a focus on training to a focus on inference. Training is the process by which models are created while inference is the type of computing that runs AI models and related tools such as ChatGPT.

The shift in computing's total share to inference has been underway for a while, but now, change is coming from two places. First, more AI users means more inference demand. The second is that part of DeepSeek's secret sauce is how improvement takes place in the inference stage. Nvidia took a positive spin, via a spokesperson.

"DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling. DeepSeek's work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant," an Nvidia spokesperson told BI.

"Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking. We now have three scaling laws: pre-training and post-training, which continue, and new test-time scaling."

Take 6: Open-source changes model building

The most under-hyped part of DeepSeek's innovations is how easy it will now be to take any AI model and turn it into a more powerful "reasoning" model, according to Jack Clark, an Anthropic cofounder, and a former OpenAI employee, wrote about DeepSeek in his newsletter Import AI on Monday.

Clark also explained that some AI companies, such as OpenAI, have been hiding all the reasoning steps that their latest AI models take. DeepSeek's models show all these intermediate "chains of thought" for anyone to see and use. This radically changes how AI models are controlled, Clark wrote.

"Some providers like OpenAI had previously chosen to obscure the chains of thought of their models, making this harder," Clark explained. "There's now an open-weight model floating around the internet which you can use to bootstrap any other sufficiently powerful base model into being an AI reasoner. AI capabilities worldwide just took a one-way ratchet forward."

Take 7: Programmers still matter

DeepSeek improved by using novel programming methods, which Samir Kumar, co-founder and general partner at VC firm Touring Capital, saw as a reminder that humans are still coding the most exciting innovations in AI.

He told BI that DeepSeek is "a good reminder of the talent and skillset of hardcore human low-level programmers."

Got a tip or an insight to share? Contact BI's senior reporter Emma Cosgrove at [email protected] or use the secure messaging app Signal: 443-333-9088.

Contact Pranav from a nonwork device securely on Signal at +1-408-905-9124 or email him at [email protected].

You can email Jyoti at [email protected] or DM her via X @jyoti_mann1

• Developers filed permits to operate natural gas turbines at Stargate's site in Abilene, Texas.
• The turbines' combined capacity is 360 MW, a fraction of the power Stargate's data centers need.
• That's still a lot of electricity — enough to power 90,000 Texas homes.

The developers of the first Project Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, plan to build a natural gas plant on the site, according to public filings reviewed by Business Insider.

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank have thus far provided little detail on the potential energy use of Stargate, a joint venture formed to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure in the US and announced last week by the White House.

The filings said that once operational, the plant could produce up to 360.5 megawatts of power at any given time, up to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. One MW of electricity can power 250 residential customers during peak hours, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said. This means 360.5 MW is enough to power 90,000 homes in Texas — roughly double the amount of households in Abilene, according to the US Census Bureau.

These permit applications were filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality by a consulting firm working on behalf of AI cloud startup Crusoe. Crusoe is the owner of Project Ludicrous, the $1.1 billion data center project in Abilene widely thought to be the first Stargate location.

An initial application to permit 10 simple-cycle natural gas turbines under Title V of the Clean Air Act — at a site that shares an address with Project Ludicrous — is under review by the TCEQ.

The application said the facility housing the turbines will be used for "primary and backup power" for "data centers and computing. " Its use will be "onsite only," meaning the power generated by the turbines won't be available to the local grid.

Half of the turbine models come from GE Vernova, and the other half come from Solar Turbines, a subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. The turbines are designed to be installed and operational quickly, and some GE models can be up and running in as little as two weeks, the company has said in marketing materials.

A permit allowing diesel-fired backup generators to run at the site is already in effect.

Developing the plant is expected to cost half a billion dollars, a city document viewed by BI said.

Andrew Schmitt, a spokesperson for Crusoe, the startup developing Project Ludicrous, declined to comment on the record about the natural gas plant. He directed BI to the company's previous comments about the site's power, which "includes both on-and off-site renewable resources, including surrounding wind developments and a potential future large-scale onsite solar installation."

OpenAI and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Stargate will need lots of power

Morgan Stanley analysts on Friday estimated the entire Stargate project would require about 15 gigawatts.

That amount of power would be spread out across multiple locations, though the number of Stargate sites and how much power each would use is not publicly known. Some reports in the media and from financial analysts have indicated that Stargate sites could have a power demand of 5 GW, an amount drawn from a document said to have been pitched by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to the Biden administration, first reported by Bloomberg.

If that is the case, then 360.5 MW, the capacity of the natural gas turbines at Project Ludicrous, would make up a tiny fraction — less than 1% — of how much power the site will ultimately need.

Some of that power will come from a substation, allowing Project Ludicrous to draw power from the local electric grid. The data center is located on land owned by energy tech company Lancium, which has built a 200 MW substation on the site, a company spokesperson told Business Insider. The company's website said it plans to increase capacity to five times that amount in 2025.

The race to develop AI infrastructure has caused electricity demand in the US to soar dramatically for the first time in two decades. Data center electricity use could triple in the US by 2028, according to the latest report from the Department of Energy.

The recent launch of DeepSeek has raised questions about AI infrastructure spending in the US, as the Chinese AI model is 20 to 40 times cheaper than OpenAI's and can run more efficiently with fewer chips.

Do you work in or have knowledge of the data center industry and have insight to share? Get in touch with this reporter at [email protected] or reach out via the encrypted messaging app Signal at +1-929-524-6924.

It was apparently a busy weekend for key players involved in Donald Trump's efforts to make a deal to save TikTok.

Perhaps the most appealing option for ByteDance could be if Trump blessed a merger between TikTok and Perplexity AI—a San Francisco-based AI search company worth about $9 billion that appears to view a TikTok video content acquisition as a path to compete with major players like Google and OpenAI.

On Sunday, Perplexity AI submitted a revised merger proposal to TikTok-owner ByteDance, reviewed by CNBC, which sources told AP News included feedback from the Trump administration.

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Comments

• China's DeepSeek model challenges US AI firms with cost-effective, efficient performance.
• DeepSeek's model, using modest hardware, is 20 to 40 times cheaper than OpenAI's.
• DeepSeek's efficiency raises questions about US investments in AI infrastructure.

The bombshell that is China's DeepSeek model has set the AI ecosystem alight.

The models are high-performing, relatively cheap, and compute-efficient, which has led many to posit that they pose an existential threat to American companies like OpenAI and Meta — and the trillions of dollars going into building, improving, and scaling US AI infrastructure.

The price of DeepSeek's open-source model is competitive — 20 to 40 times cheaper to run than comparable models from OpenAI, Bernstein analysts said.

But the potentially more nerve-racking element in the DeepSeek equation for US-built models is the relatively modest hardware stack used to build them.

The DeepSeek-V3 model, which is most comparable to OpenAI's ChatGPT, was trained on a cluster of 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs, according to the technical report published by the company.

H800s are the first version of the company's defeatured chip for the Chinese market. After the regulations were amended, the company made another defeatured chip, the H20 to comply with the changes.

Though this may not always be the case, chips are the most substantial cost in the large language model training equation. Being forced to use less powerful, cheaper chips created a constraint that the DeepSeek team has ostensibly overcome.

"Innovation under constraints takes genius," Sri Ambati, the CEO of the open-source AI platform H2O.ai, told Business Insider.

Even on subpar hardware, training DeepSeek-V3 took less than two months, the company's report said.

The efficiency advantage

DeepSeek-V3 is small relative to its capabilities and has 671 billion parameters, while ChatGPT-4 has 1.76 trillion, which makes it easier to run. But DeepSeek-V3 still hits impressive benchmarks of understanding.

Its smaller size comes in part by using a different architecture than ChatGPT, called a "mixture of experts." The model has pockets of expertise built in, which go into action when called upon and sit dormant when irrelevant to the query. This type of model is growing in popularity, and DeepSeek's advantage is that it built an extremely efficient version of an inherently efficient architecture.

"Someone made this analogy: It's almost as if someone released a $20 iPhone," Jared Quincy Davis, the CEO of Foundry, told BI.

The Chinese model used a fraction of the time, a fraction of the number of chips, and a less capable, less expensive chip cluster. Essentially, it's a drastically cheaper, competitively capable model that the firm is virtually giving away for free.

Bernstein analysts said that DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model more comparable to OpenAI's o1 or o3, is even more concerning from a competitive standpoint. This model uses reasoning techniques to interrogate its own responses and thinking, similar to OpenAI's latest reasoning models.

R1 was built on top of V3, but the research paper released with the more advanced model doesn't include information about the hardware stack behind it. DeepSeek used strategies like generating its own training data to train R1, which requires more compute than using data scraped from the internet or generated by humans.

This technique is often referred to as "distillation" and is becoming standard practice, Ambati said.

Distillation brings with it another layer of controversy, though. A company using its own models to distill a smarter, smaller model is one thing. But the legality of using other company's models to distill new ones depends on licensing.

Still, DeepSeek's techniques are more iterative and likely to be taken up by the AI indsutry immediately.

For years, model developers and startups have focused on smaller models since their size makes them cheaper to build and operate. The thinking was that small models would serve specific tasks. But what DeepSeek and potentially OpenAI's o3 mini demonstrate is that small models can also be generalists.

It's not game over

A coalition of players including Oracle and OpenAI, with cooperation from the White House, announced Stargate, a $500 billion data center project in Texas — the latest in a quick procession of developments in large-scale conversion to accelerated computing. DeepSeek's surprise release has called that investment into question, and Nvidia, the largest beneficiary of the investment, is on a roller coaster as a result. The company's stock plummeted more than 13% Monday.

But Bernstein said the response is out of step with the reality.

"DeepSeek DID NOT 'build OpenAI for $5M'," Bernstein analysts wrote in a Monday investor note. The panic, especially on X, is blown out of proportion, the analysts said.

DeepSeek's own research paper on V3 says: "The aforementioned costs include only the official training of DeepSeek-V3, excluding the costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, or data." So the $5 million figure is only part of the equation.

"The models look fantastic but we don't think they are miracles," Bernstein continued. Last week China also announced a roughly $140 billion investment in data centers, in a sign that infrastructure is still needed despite DeepSeek's achievements.

The competition for model supremacy is fierce, and OpenAI's moat may indeed be in question. But demand for chips shows no signs of slowing, Bernstein said. Tech leaders are circling back to a centuries-old economic adage to explain the moment.

The Jevons paradox is the idea that innovation begets demand. As technology gets cheaper or more efficient, demand increases much faster than prices drop. That's what providers of computing power, such as Foundry's Jared Quincy Davis, have been espousing for years. This week, Bernstein and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella picked up the mantle, too.

"Jevons paradox strikes again!" Nadella posted on X Monday morning. "As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of."

The Trump administration is negotiating a deal that would see Oracle take over TikTok alongside new U.S. investors, according to a report by NPR. Lawmakers passed a bill last year forcing Chinese parent company ByteDance to either sell TikTok or see it banned in the U.S. The app briefly went dark before the law took […]

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Solar farms can be completed far faster than nuclear reactors and natural gas power plants.

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Stargate — the massive infrastructure project to build data centers for OpenAI in the U.S. — lacks a fully developed plan and hasn’t secured funding yet, according to a report from the Financial Times. Backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Middle East AI fund MGX, and others, Stargate would funnel around $100 billion — and upward of […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Tuesday, OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced plans to form Stargate, a new company that will invest $500 billion in AI computing infrastructure across the United States over four years. The announcement came during a White House meeting with President Donald Trump, who called it the "largest AI infrastructure project in history."

However, the origins of the Stargate project extend back to 2024, prior to Trump beginning his second term in office, and skeptics have begun to take aim at the numbers announced.

OpenAI says the goal of Stargate is to kickstart building more data centers to expand computing capacity for current and future AI projects, including OpenAI's goal of "AGI," which the company defines as a highly autonomous AI system that "outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

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Comments

• President Donald Trump said he would be open to Elon Musk or Larry Ellison buying TikTok.
• Trump previously floated a joint venture, saying that the US should own half of the app.
• Trump has signed an executive order that gives TikTok another 75 days to figure out a new game plan.

A day after his inauguration, President Donald Trump said he'd be on board with Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison buying TikTok.

In a Tuesday press briefing announcing a $500 billion artificial intelligence joint venture with Oracle, Trump said he was open to the idea of Ellison or Musk buying TikTok.

When asked by a reporter if he would be open to Musk buying the app, Trump said, "I would be, if he wanted to buy it, yes."

"I'd like Larry to buy it, too," he added.

While Musk has not directly expressed interest in buying TikTok, he said on X on Sunday that he has "been against a TikTok ban for a long time" because it "goes against freedom of speech."

A handful of big-name investors have shown interest in buying the app. "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary has said that he, in collaboration with former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, would be interested in purchasing the app.

YouTuber MrBeast also said in an X post on January 13, "Okay fine, I'll buy Tik Tok so it doesn't get banned." MrBeast has joined a group of investors led by tech entrepreneur Jesse Tinsley, who have expressed interest in buying the app, the group's spokesperson told Bloomberg.

In 2024, ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, said it would rather shut down TikTok in the US than sell it.

For now, TikTok's fate in the US hangs in the balance after the Supreme Court on Friday upheld the divest-or-ban law. This law requires ByteDance to divest from the platform in the US, or stop operating in the country.

TikTok went dark for its 170 million US users on Saturday. Hours later, its operations were restored.

Shortly after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order to pause the ban, which gives TikTok another 75 days to figure out a game plan.

Trump also suggested on Monday that the US should own half of TikTok.

"So I think, like a joint venture, I think we would have a joint venture with the people from TikTok. We'll see what happens," Trump added, without specifying who he wanted to have as TikTok's US partner.

Trump's order to delay the TikTok ban has prompted some opposition from within the GOP.

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — and Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska wrote in a joint statement on Sunday that there is "no legal basis" for TikTok to get an extension.

In the statement, the senators lauded Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for complying with the ban.

"President Trump said he signed the executive order to 'make a deal to protect our national security,'" Ian Swanson, Ricketts' press secretary, told BI.

"Senator Ricketts agrees that protecting our national security is paramount and that can only be done by ridding TikTok of all ties with Communist China," Swanson added.

Representatives for Musk, Oracle, and Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

OpenAI says that it will team up with Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and with Oracle, among others, to build multiple data centers for AI in the U.S. The joint venture, called the Stargate Project, will begin with a large data center project in Texas and eventually expand to other states. The companies expect to commit $100 billion […]

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• On Sunday, TikTok and some US tech companies ignored a TikTok-ban law at the urging of Donald Trump.
• Trump wasn't president at the time. Once he became president, he signed an order to put the ban on hold.
• Does Trump have that power? It's unclear. That's a problem for tech companies.

Here's a 2025 conundrum for Big Tech companies: Do they follow the president's orders? Or do they follow the law?

That's what the likes of Apple, Google, and Oracle are grappling with following a chaotic weekend that saw TikTok voluntarily shut itself down in the US, then restart less than a day later, claiming that "President Trump" said it was OK to do so.

A couple of problems with that argument: Donald Trump wasn't president of the United States this weekend — Joe Biden was still in the White House. And yes: Trump immediately signed an executive order after he once again became president on Monday telling TikTok and other tech companies to ignore a law that says TikTok can't operate in the US while it's owned by a Chinese company. But it's far from clear how much weight Trump's order holds.

So in the very near term, attorneys and executives at tech companies need to decide whether they're willing to take Trump's word, or if they need additional assurances.

At the moment, it looks like Oracle, controlled by Larry Ellison, a Trump backer, is going with Trump's assurances and is providing cloud services that are keeping TikTok running in the US. Apple and Google, which used to distribute TikTok via their app stores, don't seem convinced: TikTok disappeared from their stores on Sunday and has yet to return. That means US users can have all the TikTok they want, but it prevents TikTok from updating the app for maintenance and repairs — something that could eventually cause problems. (I've asked Oracle for comment. Google declined to comment, and Apple didn't respond to requests for comment.)

One possible out for Google and Apple: Trump has ordered his attorney general, who seems likely to be Pam Bondi, to send letters to Apple, Google, and other providers giving them the all clear to ignore the law. But Bondi isn't attorney general yet, and even when Apple et al. get that letter, it's not clear whether it will be enough to satisfy them.

I'm not going to get into the weeds about the nature of executive orders vs. laws — or whether Trump's claim that he can at least temporarily override a law because of national security concerns would hold up in court. Suffice it to say that there isn't any clarity about any of this: Even Trump allies like Sen. Tom Cotton and House Speaker Mike Johnson have put out statements that seem to conflict with Trump's statements.

The point is that no one can say, with a straight face, that they have 100% confidence about whether the law, passed overwhelmingly by Congress last year and upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court decision last week, is binding. That's an astonishing place for us to be.

It's also not one that we can pin completely on Trump. In his last days in office, Biden also said he wouldn't enforce the law he signed last year — though he did it via anonymous officials speaking with reporters, and eventually his press secretary, and not via an official order. At the same time, some Democrats who voted for the bill in the spring, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, spent the past few days arguing that the ban in the sell-or-ban law they approved should be delayed.

But Trump is taking the uncertainty and supercharging it: In social media statements and a press conference he held Monday, he seemed to suggest that the US government itself might end up owning TikTok. Or that maybe it would be American companies that own half the operation. He also argued that TikTok's Chinese ownership really doesn't matter, since the US already uses lots of other stuff made in China, like "telephones." And that even if China is snooping on US users, that probably also doesn't matter because TikTok is mostly used by kids, and, "If China's going to get information about young kids … I dunno. To be honest, I think we have bigger problems than them."

It's worth watching all three minutes of this White House press conference clip, just to get a sense of how off-the-cuff Trump seems to be treating the whole thing. Imagine running a trillion-dollar company and being forced to decipher this:

We have been here before, of course. America and the rest of the world spent much of the first Trump administration trying to figure out whether Trump really meant what he was saying, or if he could actually act on what he was saying, and whether he'd change his mind a little while later.

One big difference this time around: Tech executives, along with many other US leaders, are scrambling to tell Trump how supportive they are of his presidency this time. But it's one thing to praise Trump, or cut him a check, or to be conspicuously on camera during his inauguration. Trusting that his say-so is good enough to get you out of trouble for violating a law — if that's what actually happens — is brand-new ground.

• TikTok is back online in the US after Donald Trump promised to delay a ban.
• TikTok is working for users who already have the app, but unavailable to download from app stores.
• The Supreme Court upheld the TikTok divest-or-ban law on Friday.

After going dark for millions of Americans this weekend, TikTok came back online following a pledge from Donald Trump to keep it going. There's just one problem: the law says it should still be offline.

TikTok's status in the US was thrown into confusion ahead of Trump's inauguration on Monday after the president-elect promised to extend the deadline on a law threatening to ban the social media app unless it was sold by its Chinese owner ByteDance.

The divest-or-ban law signed in April last year on national security grounds was upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, meaning TikTok would officially be offline in the US on January 19 unless it had a new owner. On Saturday, TikTok went dark for American users ahead of the ban.

But following Trump's pledge over the weekend to delay the law's effect with an executive order — he asked tech companies to "not let TikTok stay dark" — the companies responsible for making TikTok available in the US appear to have taken diverging paths over the law.

"In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service," the company said in a statement on Sunday.

TikTok also thanked Trump for his assurance that its service providers — which include Apple, Google, Oracle, and cloud provider Akamai — "will face no penalties" by providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans.

Not all service providers seem to have been convinced that's the case.

Both Apple and Google have opted to comply with the law upheld by the Supreme Court by blocking new downloads of TikTok on their respective app stores; TikTok remained unavailable on their app stores ahead of Trump's inauguration on Monday.

It means people in the US can use TikTok if they have already installed it, but they cannot download it from Apple or Google's app stores.

Meanwhile, The Information reported on Sunday that key partner Oracle was turning its TikTok servers back on to support that process — despite the ban. Under the terms of a 2020 deal, US TikTok user data is stored on Oracle Cloud.

TikTok, Oracle, Apple, Google, and additional service provider Akamai Technologies did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

How this saga will unfold once Trump takes office continues to face uncertainty.

Though Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that "there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark" before his promised executive order, it appears that Apple and Google have chosen to stand by the law that officially bans TikTok.

Not standing by it could come with risk: the law states that US service providers that make TikTok available in the country face a penalty of $5,000 for each person who uses the app. TikTok has over 170 million users in the US so that fine could top $850 billion.

The decision to stick by the law has also drawn praise from some quarters of the Republican Party. In a statement, Senators Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts commended tech companies for following the law.

"The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company that violates it," they said. "Now that the law has taken effect, there's no legal basis for any kind of 'extension' of its effective date."

• A software engineer left a FAANG company for Oracle in 2024 due to a cultural mismatch.
• He felt micromanaged and a lack of trust at the FAANG company even though he worked intense hours.
• Oracle offered a structured onboarding process and a collaborative environment, and he plans to stay.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a 27-year-old software engineer at Oracle who previously worked at a FAANG company. The source's name and full employment history are known to Business Insider but are not named to protect their privacy. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In March 2022, I interviewed with a FAANG company for a software engineering role.

I heard back from my final round within a few days and started about three weeks after signing the offer. I didn't stay at the FAANG company very long because the culture was not a fit for me.

I'm now at Oracle and don't plan on leaving. Here's how my work experiences at both companies compare.

The FAANG company seemed more focused on personality fit during the interview process

After an HR screen and a tech screen, I had a final round of four interviews back-to-back, each lasting 45 minutes. Three interviewers were senior engineers, and one was the hiring manager.

The personality questions were more detailed than the technical questions. They wanted to know if I demonstrated the company's leadership principles, so they asked questions like "Can you tell me about a time you affected change in a company?" and "Can you tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer?"

The technical questions were on standard LeetCode and system design. I was asked to whiteboard and design a service similar to Instagram and discuss how I'd engineer it to scale to a billion users.

The FAANG company sought candidates willing to work long hours

The interviewers didn't ask directly how long I was willing to work, but they asked: "Tell me about a time when you had to meet an aggressive deadline." The hiring manager also told me the team I'd be joining was fairly new and wanted to roll out the technology they were developing quickly.

I did notice a few more red flags. Everyone I interviewed with had joined within the past year and a half. Most folks I interviewed with at Oracle had been at the company for four to six years.

One of the senior engineers at the FAANG company said it's fast-paced and has a work-hard culture, so there's a lot of turnover. However, I'd also get to learn a lot and work on features that millions of customers would use, and I was looking forward to that experience.

My Oracle interview process took longer

I interviewed with Oracle in February 2024 and started in March.

The steps were the same, but the Oracle process focused more on technical ability than the FAANG company.

In the final round, I was interviewed by two senior engineers, the hiring manager, and a product manager. The senior engineers and my hiring manager also asked me standard LeetCode and system design questions. My hiring manager asked if I had data center experience, which I didn't. The product manager asked me to go deep into the technical stuff I previously worked on.

The offer negotiation process was pretty similar for both companies

Both times, I had competing offers and asked them to match compensation. They matched it by increasing the amount of vested stock they'd give me, and I got a 10% total compensation increase from both.

Oracle's RSU vesting is spread evenly across four years. At the FAANG company, the four-year stock vest schedule was 5% for year one, 15% for year two, 40% for year three, and 40% for year four.

After my first year at the FAANG company, I received a 3% raise on my base pay. I haven't received a raise at Oracle yet.

I found Oracle's onboarding process to be much more structured

The initial few weeks at both companies were spent getting access to code bases, familiarizing myself with the teams' work, and having a lot of 1:1 meetings.

At Oracle, everyone helped explain the organization's overall mission. The team had an onboarding document that I could follow that outlined expectations.

There was no structure or clear expectations in the first few weeks at the FAANG company. Management also didn't focus much on helping people get onboarded.

My FAANG coworkers seemed very focused on their level of seniority

Almost every single engineer I met in my first week at the FAANG company either asked me a question about how I could help them get a promotion or was very closed off and wouldn't communicate much. One midlevel engineer asked me in our first meeting whether I'd be open to being "mentored" by him so he could use me as a data point to support his coming promotion.

Another engineer I met with told me, "That is between me and my manager," when I asked him about his long-term career goals during our first meeting. I asked my skip-level manager a question about the team, and he told me my question was better suited for a lower-level manager, not him.

At Oracle, everyone was friendly and gave me information and advice on succeeding.

Oracle has a sense of teamwork and collaboration that the FAANG company did not have

In my experience, micromanagement is virtually nonexistent at Oracle. Management and executives allow engineers and other contributors to set their own deadlines and expectations. I felt trusted.

The culture at the FAANG company was one of the most intense I've been part of. My teammates and I regularly worked until late into the night, and there was lots of micromanagement, which is one of the reasons I left. It felt like there was a lack of trust in lower-level employees.

It affected both my mental and physical health. My sleep pattern was chaotic, and I skipped a lot of meals because of the constant stress and anxiety.

Since I left the FAANG company for Oracle, I haven't looked back

The final straw was when the FAANG company asked me to relocate to a different state with three-months notice. I told my manager I'd move but immediately started searching for external jobs.

I got my Oracle offer shortly after. When I finally gave my two weeks' notice at the FAANG company, I felt a huge weight lifted off my chest.

Changing companies improved my mental health, and my stress levels dropped dramatically. I plan to stay at Oracle long-term.

Want to share your Big Tech job experience? Email Lauryn Haas at [email protected].

• Larry Ellison, the 80-year-old cofounder of Oracle, is one of the most interesting men in tech.
• Whether yacht racing, buying Hawaiian islands, or trash-talking competitors, he keeps it lively.
• Now, he's one of the world's richest people with a net worth of about $190 billion.

Larry Ellison is the founder and chief technology officer at software company Oracle. Now, he's also the world's fourth-richest man and has a net worth of $190 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The billionaire's fortunes have surged by over $67 billion this year, thanks to spiking demand for generative AI. The windfall puts him ahead of tech execs like Google cofounder Sergey Brin and former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer. 

The 80-year-old started Oracle in 1977, and decades later he's still one of the top dogs in Silicon Valley despite living in Hawaii full time — and owning an entire island. Ellison has also been a major investor in Tesla, Salesforce, and even reportedly had a seat on Apple's board of directors for a while.

Outside the office, the billionaire boasts an impressive watch collection and indulges in hobbies like yacht racing. His children have made their own names in the film industry, and his son David Ellison is set to become the CEO of Paramount after its merger with his Skydance Media production company. Through some of Larry's entities, he will control Paramount, per a September filing.

Here's a look at the life and career of Ellison so far.

Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born in the Bronx on August 17, 1944, the son of a single mother named Florence Spellman.

When he was 9 months old, Larry came down with pneumonia, Vanity Fair reported. His mom sent him to Chicago to live with his aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison.

Vanity Fair reported that Louis, his adoptive father, was a Russian immigrant who took the name "Ellison" in tribute to the place in which he entered the US: Ellis Island.

Ellison is a college dropout.

Ellison went to high school in Chicago's South Side before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When his adoptive mother died during his second year at college, Ellison dropped out. He tried college again later at the University of Chicago but dropped out again after only one semester, Vanity Fair reported.

In 1966, a 22-year-old Ellison moved to Berkeley, California — near what would become Silicon Valley and already the place where the tech industry was taking off.

He made the trip from Chicago to California in a flashy turquoise Thunderbird that he thought would make an impression in his new life, Vanity Fair reported.

Ellison bounced around from job to job, including stints at companies like Wells Fargo and the mainframe manufacturer Amdahl. Along the way, he learned computer and programming skills.

In 1977, Ellison and partners Bob Miner and Ed Oates founded a new company, Software Development Laboratories.

The company started with $2,000 of funding.

Ellison and company were inspired by IBM computer scientist Edgar F. Codd's theories for a so-called relational database — a way for computer systems to store and access information, Britannican said. Nowadays, they're taken for granted, but in the '70s, they were a revolutionary idea.

The first version of the Oracle database was version 2 — there was no version 1.

In 1979, the company renamed itself Relational Software Inc., and in 1982, it formally became Oracle Systems Corp., after its flagship product.

In 1986, Oracle had its initial public offering, reporting revenue of $55 million.

As one of the key drivers of the growing computer industry, Oracle grew fast. The company is responsible for providing the databases in which businesses track information that is crucial to their operations.

Ellison became a billionaire at age 49. Now, he has a net worth of roughly $152 billion, according to Forbes, after racking up $50 billion in gains thanks to Oracle and Tesla stock. That makes him the seventh-richest person in the world.

Still, in 1990, Oracle had to lay off 10% of its workforce, about 400 people, because of what Ellison later described as "an incredible business mistake."

Oracle reported a loss of $36 million in September 1990 after admitting that it had miscalculated its revenue earlier that year, The New York Times reported.

It didn't get the decade off to a great start. After adjusting for that error, Oracle was said to be close to bankruptcy. At the same time, rivals like Sybase were eating away at Oracle's market share.

It took a few years, but by 1992, Ellison and Oracle managed to right the course with new employees and the popular Oracle7 database.

Ellison is known for his willingness to trash-talk competitors.

For much of the '90s, he and Oracle were locked in a public-relations battle with the competitor Informix, which went so far as to place a "Dinosaur Crossing" billboard outside Oracle's Silicon Valley offices at one point, Fortune reported in 1997.

His financial success has led to some expensive hobbies.

With Ellison as Oracle's major shareholder, his millions kept rolling in. He started to indulge in some expensive hobbies — including yacht racing. That's Ellison at the helm during a 1995 race.

He also partly financed the BMW Oracle USA sailing team, which won the America's Cup in 2010, according to Bloomberg.

Ellison was an early investor in Salesforce.

In 1999, Ellison's protégé, Marc Benioff, left Oracle to work on a new startup called Salesforce.com. Ellison was an early investor, putting $2 million into his friend's new venture.

When Benioff found out that Ellison had Oracle working on a direct competitor to Salesforce's product, he tried to force his mentor to quit Salesforce's board. Instead, Ellison forced Benioff to fire him — meaning Ellison kept his shares in Salesforce.

Given that Salesforce is now a $267 billion company, Ellison personally profits even when his competitors do well. It has led to a love-hate relationship between the two executives that continues to this day, with the two taking shots at each other in the press.

The dot-com boom of the late '90s benefited Oracle.

All of those new dot-com companies needed databases, and Oracle was there to sell them. Although investors lost out in the dot-com crash, Oracle came out of it stronger due to its acquisitions and the demand for software solutions.

With the coffers overflowing, Ellison was able to lead Oracle through a spending spree once the dot-com boom was over and prices were low.

In 2005, for example, Oracle snapped up the HR software provider PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion.

And in 2010, Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a server company that started at about the same time as Oracle, in 1982. That acquisition gave Oracle lots of key technology, including control over the popular MySQL database.

Ellison has also spent lavishly over the years, so much so that his accountant, Philip Simon, once asked him to "budget and plan," according to Bloomberg.

Ellison has expensive taste. Over the years he's built up an impressive collection of Richard Mille watches, an expert previously told BI. The timepieces start in the six-figure range and can go for over $1 million in some cases.

In 2009, the billionaire purchased the Indian Wells tennis tournament for a reported $100 million, The Los Angeles Times reported.

In 2010, Ellison signed the Giving Pledge.

By signing the pledge, Ellison promised to donate 95% of his fortune before he dies. And in May 2016, Ellison donated $200 million to a cancer treatment center at the University of Southern California, Forbes reported.

Starting in the 2010s, Ellison started to take more of a back seat at Oracle, handing more responsibilities to trusted lieutenants, like Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, then Oracle's copresidents.

Ellison hired Hurd, a former CEO of HP, in 2010, Inc reported. Catz has made a reputation for herself among analysts for what they describe as brilliant business strategy.

But Ellison's spending didn't slow down. In 2012, he bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

Ellison founded a startup called Sensei in 2016 that does hydroponic farming and owns a wellness retreat on Lanai.

He also purchased Hawaiian budget airline Island Air in 2014, before selling a controlling interest in the airline two years later after it struggled financially.

In 2014, Ellison officially stepped down as Oracle CEO.

Ellison handed control over to Hurd and Catz, who became co-CEOs. Ellison now serves as the company's chairman and chief technology officer. Following Hurd's death in 2019, Catz became the sole CEO.

In 2016, Ellison scored a personal coup: the purchase of NetSuite.

Back in 1998, Ellison had made a $125 million investment in ex-Oracle exec Evan Goldberg's startup business-management software firm, NetSuite. It ended up working out well for Ellison when NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson negotiated the sale of the company to Oracle for $9.3 billion, netting Ellison a cool $3.5 billion in cash for his stake.

NetSuite investor T. Rowe Price tried to block the deal, citing Ellison's conflict of interest, but the sale closed in November 2016.

He's used his billions in a variety of ways: he invested in educational platform maker Leapfrog Enterprises and was an early investor in the ill-fated blood-testing company Theranos.

Ellison has held shares in some of the most recognizable companies, one of which was the infamous blood-testing company Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes. It had a promising future until its flaws were exposed and Holmes received a prison sentence.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO back in 1997, he asked Ellison to sit on the board. Ellison served for a while, but felt that he couldn't devote the time and left in 2002, according to Forbes. Compensation for his role was an option to buy about 70,000 shares, which would've amounted to about $1 million at the time of his departure.

Ellison owns homes on the East and West coasts as part of a multibillion-dollar real-estate portfolio.

Ellison reportedly owns the Astor Beechwood Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and a home in Malibu. Ellison also has houses in Palm Beach, Florida and more in a multibillion-dollar real-estate portfolio.

Both of his two children work in the film industry.

His daughter, Megan, is an Oscar-nominated film producer and the founder of Annapurna Pictures. The company has produced films like "Zero Dark Thirty" and "American Hustle."

Ellison's son, David, is also in the film business. His company, Skydance Media, has produced movies like "Terminator: Dark Fate" and films in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise.

After months of discussions in 2024, Skydance Media and Paramount agreed to a deal, creating "New Paramount," which David will be CEO of. He has plans to "improve profitability, foster stability and independence for creators, and enable more investment in faster growing digital platforms," the companies said.

Ellison was one of the few tech leaders who had a friendly relationship with former President Donald Trump.

Ellison said publicly that he supported Trump and wants him to do well, and hosted a Trump fundraiser at his Rancho Mirage home in February, though he did not attend, Forbes reported. The fundraiser caused an outcry among Oracle employees, who started a petition asking senior Oracle leadership to stand up to Ellison.

Catz, the CEO of Oracle, also had close ties to the Trump administration, having served on Trump's transition team. 

Ellison and Trump remained close during Trump's time in office and reportedly spoke on the phone about possible coronavirus treatments. Trump also supported Oracle's bid to buy TikTok, calling Oracle a "great company."

In December 2018, Ellison joined the board of directors at Tesla, where he's been a major investor.

Earlier in 2018, Ellison described Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a "close friend," and defended him from critics. When Musk acquired Twitter — now X — in 2022, Ellison offered to invest $1 billion.

Musk went on to help Ellison reset his forgotten password, biographer Walter Isaacson wrote.

In December 2020, Ellison revealed that he moved to Lanai full-time.

The announcement came after Oracle decided to move its headquarters to Austin, leading Oracle employees to ask Ellison if he planned to move to Texas too.

"The answer is no," Ellison wrote in a company-wide email. "I've moved to the state of Hawaii and I'll be using the power of Zoom to work from the island of Lanai."

He signed the email: "Mahalo, Larry."

He left Tesla's board in August 2022.

In a proxy filing in June 2022, the electric vehicle maker revealed that Ellison would be leaving the board. Since then, he and Musk have appeared to maintain their close relationship.

Oracle had a record-breaking 2023, and cemented itself in the new age of artificial intelligence.

Oracle's shares continued to hit records, CNBC reported. The company proved that it's not going any where any time soon.

In 2023, Oracle backed OpenAI rival Cohere.

Oracle joined other tech giants, like Salesforce, in backing the tech startup in June 2023. It began offering generative AI to its clients based on tech made by Cohere.

"Cohere and Oracle are working together to make it very, very easy for enterprise customers to train their own specialized large language models while protecting the privacy of their training data," Ellison previously said.

Oracle announced in April that it would be moving its headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee.

Despite its big move to Austin only four years ago, Ellison said that Oracle is planning to move its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee.

In April 2024, the exec announced that Oracle has plans for a "huge campus" in Nashville that will one day serve as the software giant's world headquarters. The company relocated from the San Francisco area to Austin, Texas in 2020.

"It's the center of the industry we're most concerned about, which is the healthcare industry," Ellison said at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville, CNBC reported.

Ellison's wealth jumped $14 billion after record earnings from Oracle.

Oracle's cloud applications business saw its shares spike by 13% in June 2024 after the company posted strong annual earnings due to demand for generative AI, Fortune reported. Ellison, who now serves as Oracle's CTO and owns about 40% of the company's cloud sector, got a $14 billion boost to his fortune.

The company also announced a partnership with AI startup Cohere, enabling its enterprise customers to build their own generative AI apps. "Cohere and Oracle are working together to make it very, very easy for enterprise customers to train their own specialized large language models while protecting the privacy of their training data," Ellison said during the company's earnings call.

Ellison to control Paramount as its majority shareholder

Ellison is set to become the controlling shareholder of Paramount following its merger with Skydance Media, a company founded by his son, David Ellison.

Pinnacle Media, Larry Ellison's investment firm, will acquire 77.5% of the voting interest currently held by Shari Redstone, according to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission. This move effectively transfers control of Paramount from Redstone to Ellison.

While David Ellison has been named Paramount's new CEO and may retain some autonomy in the role, the FCC filing reveals that his father will hold ultimate authority as the primary shareholder and will likely retain significant decision-making power, Brian Quinn, a Boston College Law School professor, told the New York Times.

The deal, valued at $8 billion, includes major assets like CBS and MTV. RedBird Capital Partners, a private-equity firm backing Skydance, will acquire some voting rights, but Larry Ellison will retain the largest stake. He plays a sizable role in the entertainment industry, including cameos in movies such as "Iron Man 2" and through the financial backing of his children's ventures, including his daughter Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures. 

Matt Weinberger and Taylor Nicole Rogers contributed to an earlier version of this story.

Correction: May 7, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated Larry Ellison's role at Oracle. He's the chief technology officer, not the CEO.

Ellison has a reputation as an international, jet-setting playboy.

Ellison has been divorced four times. The 80-year-old billionaire is now reportedly remarried to a 33-year-old named Keren Zhu, The Wall Street Journal reported in December.

 

Ellison gave a donation to the University of Michigan's football team and helped secure the top high school quarterback in the country

The University of Michigan football team flipped Bryce Underwood, the top high school quarterback in the country, from Louisiana State, thanks to a donation and support from Ellison, according to WSJ. While Ellison had no previously known connection to the school, his wife Zhu is an alum. Both Ellison and Zhu showed up in a Zoom call with Underwood and Michigan football's general manager to help recruit him, the report said. 

Oracle shares are up 60% year-to-date, increasing Ellison's net worth by $67.3 billion

Despite an 8% decline in Oracle's stock this month following a weaker-than-expected earnings report, the company's shares are still at some of their highest levels since the 1990s, boosted by cloud partnerships with Google, OpenAI, and Meta.

Ellison's net worth has increased by $67.3 billion this year, bringing his net worth to about $190 billion as of Monday, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

• Tech employees share their salary negotiation tips, which helped boost their pay by tens of thousands of dollars.
• Their negotiation strategies include practicing pitches, using data, and leveraging multiple offers.
• Research and transparency are key in negotiating better compensation in tech roles, they said.

Sarra Bounouh has worked at consulting giant Accenture and three Big Tech companies.

But she still deals with imposter syndrome, especially when talking compensation.

"Going into a negotiation is always, at least for me, a very uncomfortable discussion," Bounouh told Business Insider. "I just want to push through and ask for what I deserve."

She and four other tech employees from Meta, Google, and Cisco shared their salary negotiation tips before joining a company or when trying to get promoted. They have used these strategies to add tens of thousands of dollars to their original offers in recent years.

Product manager at Meta

Avoid offering the first number. If you must, back it up with research, said Bounouh, a product manager who joined Meta earlier this year.

She suggested using resources like Levels.fyi or Glassdoor and selecting your role and geography to see recent offers and compensation that makes sense for that job.

"I personally don't like having detailed conversations about level and compensation from that first call with the recruiter because I want to meet the team, I want to meet the hiring manager, I want to get excited about the role," she said.

Bounouh prefers to negotiate her level and compensation once there's an offer on the table.

She said she often gets asked about salary expectations early in the process because recruiters say they want to save time for both sides.

She politely declines to share a number by telling the recruiter: "I don't have a number for your right now. I will need to do some research before getting back to you. At this stage of the process, I'm more focused on meeting the hiring manager and team."

Rehearsal is key for conversations about promotions or raises, she said.

Bounouh said she practiced her pitch for every job after Accenture and increased all three jobs' initial salary offers: Microsoft by 32%, Snap by 19%, and Meta by 37%.

Product manager at Oracle

Internal transfers between teams or offices are also an opportunity to negotiate your compensation package.

Ketaki Vaidya, who moved from Oracle's India to California office in 2022, said she approached her negotiation with an "everything under the sun is negotiable" mindset.

First, Vaidya looked at Glassdoor and talked to people who'd made the move to gather salary data. She wanted to ensure she was getting a fair offer for the US' cost of living.

"I was being given this offer for the credibility that I had built in the organization. I felt like I had an upper hand in negotiating," she said. "I was much more confident in asking for the things that I deserve — so it ended up being a very smooth transition."

After negotiating her base salary up to $80,000, she discussed other compensation components, including the timing of her next review, sign-on bonuses, relocation costs, paid leave, and remote work. She negotiated a sign-on bonus of $15,000 and a relocation allowance of $15,000, which weren't part of the initial offer.

Now, her compensation is about $130,000 annually, including stock units and bonuses.

Product manager at Cisco

When Varun Kulkarni switched from consulting to tech to work on more artificial intelligence projects, he was careful not to come off as aggressive during his pay negotiations.

Once he had offers from Cisco and others in hand in 2022, he was transparent with recruiters and mentioned other offers, without introducing his own counter number.

He asked recruiters how high they could go and what they thought about other offers.

"You want to kind of not be too pushy" he said.

His offer from Cisco already matched the market rate and what several competitors were offering, but he managed to negotiate it by 5%, bringing his total compensation to $180,000.

Product manager at Google

During his 2022 recruitment process at Google, Yung-Yu Lin used his employer at the time, PayPal, to land better offers from both companies.

He interviewed and landed jobs at several places — but their pay did not compare with Google's offer.

Lin decided to negotiate a retention package. PayPal countered with a 10% pay bump. He then renegotiated with Google.

Google offered a 20% raise on his original compensation at PayPal, which brought his offer to the $350,000 to $400,000 range as a senior product manager, including stock-based compensation.

Software engineer at Meta

Hemant Pandey, a senior software engineer at Meta, used other offers and research in his most recent job search.

After two years at Salesforce, in 2021 he applied to Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and two other companies. He used offers from these companies to negotiate his compensation at Meta.

"Be very transparent that you have other offers. Even if you have interviews going on, mention those, because it's also leverage," he said. It signals to the recruiter that they have to move fast and work with your parameters.

Meta's recruiters matched the base salary and restricted stock units from the highest of all offers.

Aside from being transparent, Pandey said it is important to be proactive and research how compensation works in different companies. For example, candidates should compare how stocks are refreshed, he said. A refresher is when the stock option portion of an employee's compensation is updated.

"I also negotiated my sign-on bonus and said, 'Hey, at Salesforce, I'll be leaving my $30,000 to $40,000 of annual bonus if I join you. Can you help me accommodate that?'"

Pandey was offered $520,000 in annual pay, including stock options, in that 2021 move.

"The most significant thing happened in my career when I made the move from Salesforce to Meta, which was close to almost 80 to 90% hike" in pay, Pandey said.

Do you work in tech, consulting, or finance and have a story to share about your career journey? Please reach out at [email protected].

• Oracle and xAI love to flex the size of their GPU clusters.
• It's getting hard to tell who has the most supercomputing power as more firms claim the top spot.
• The real numbers are competitive intel and cluster size isn't everything, experts told BI.

In high school, as in tech, superlatives are important. Or maybe they just feel important in the moment. With the breakneck pace of the AI computing infrastructure buildout, it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of who has the biggest, fastest, or most powerful supercomputer — especially when multiple companies claim the title at once.

"We delivered the world's largest and fastest AI supercomputer, scaling up to 65,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs," Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Chairman, CTO, echoed by Founder Larry Ellison on the company's Monday earnings call.

In late October, Nvidia proclaimed xAI's Colossus as the "World's Largest AI Supercomputer," after Elon Musk's firm reportedly built a computing cluster with 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units in a matter of weeks. The plan is to expand to 1 million GPUs next, according to the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce (where the supercomputer is located.)

The good ole days of supercomputing are gone

It used to be simpler. "Supercomputers" were most commonly found in research settings. Naturally, there's an official list ranking supercomputers. Until recently the world's most powerful supercomputer was named El Capitan. Housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California 11 million CPUs and GPUs from Nvidia-rival AMD add up to 1.742 Exaflops of computing capacity. (One exaflop is equal to one quintillion, or a billion billions, operations per second.)

"The biggest computers don't get put on the list," Dylan Patel, chief analyst at Semianalysis, told BI. "Your competitor shouldn't know exactly what you have," he continued. The 65,000-GPU supercluster Oracle executives were praising can reach up to 65 exaflops, according to the company.

It's safe to assume, Patel said, that Nvidia's largest customers, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI also have the largest, most powerful clusters. Nvidia CFO Colette Cress said 200 fresh exaflops of Nvidia computing would be online by the end of this year — across nine different supercomputers — on Nvidia's May earnings call.

Going forward, it's going to be harder to determine whose clusters are the biggest at any given moment — and even harder to tell whose are the most powerful — no matter how much CEOs may brag.

It's not the size of the cluster — it's how you use it

On Monday's call, Ellison was asked, if the size of these gigantic clusters is actually generating better model performance.

He said larger clusters and faster GPUs are elements that speed up model training. Another is networking it all together. "So the GPU clusters aren't sitting there waiting for the data," Ellison said Monday.

Thus, the number of GPUs in a cluster isn't the only factor in the computing power calculation. Networking and programming are important too. "Exaflops" are a result of the whole package so unless companies provide them, experts can only estimate.

What's certain is that more advanced models — the kind that consider their own thinking and check their work before answering queries — require more compute than their relatives of earlier generations. So training increasingly impressive models may indeed require an arms race of sorts.

But an enormous AI arsenal doesn't automatically lead to better or more useful tools.

Sri Ambati, CEO of open-source AI platform H2O.ai, said cloud providers may want to flex their cluster size for sales reasons, but given some (albeit slow) diversification of AI hardware and the rise of smaller, more efficient models, cluster size isn't the end all be all.

Power efficiency too, is a hugely important indicator for AI computing since energy is an enormous operational expense in AI. But it gets lost in the measuring contest.

Nvidia declined to comment. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

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• Companies will soon focus on customizing AI solutions for specific needs, Cohere's CEO says.
• AI 2.0 will "help fundamentally transform how businesses operate," he wrote.
• Major AI companies like OpenAI are also releasing tools for customization.

If this was the year companies adopted AI to stay competitive, next year will likely be about customizing AI solutions for their specific needs.

"The next phase of development will move beyond generic LLMs towards tuned and highly optimized end-to-end solutions that address the specific objectives of a business," Aidan Gomez, the CEO and cofounder of Cohere, an AI company building technology for enterprises, wrote in a post on LinkedIn last week.

"AI 2.0," as he calls it, will "accelerate adoption, value creation, and will help fundamentally transform how businesses operate." He added: "Every company will be an AI company."

Cohere has partnered with major companies, including software company Oracle and IT company Fujitsu, to develop customized business solutions.

"With Oracle, we've built customized technology and tailored our AI models to power dozens (soon, hundreds) of production AI features across Netsuite and Fusion Apps," he wrote. For Fujitsu, Cohere built a model called Takane that's "specifically designed to excel in Japanese."

Last June, Cohere partnered with global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company to develop customized generative AI solutions for the firm's clients. The work is helping the startup "build trust" among more organizations, Gomez previously told Business Insider.

To meet the specific needs of so many clients, Gomez has advocated for smaller, more efficient AI models. He says they are more cost-effective than building large language models, and they give smaller startups a chance to compete with more established AI companies.

But it might be only a matter of time before the biggest companies capitalize on the customization trend, too.

OpenAI previewed an advancement during its "Shipmas" campaign that allows users to fine-tune o1 — their latest and most advanced AI model, on their own datasets. So, users can now leverage OpenAI's reinforcement-learning algorithms to customize their own models.

The technology will be available to the public next year, but OpenAI has already partnered with companies like Thomson Reuters to develop specialized legal tools and researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to build computational models for identifying genetic diseases.

Cohere did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.