Forget the Headlines: Larry Ellison is Building a Planetary Operating System
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I see the headlines flash across my screen every day. "Tech Tycoon." "Media Mogul." "Billionaire Ally." They're neat, tidy labels—like the recent Meet Larry Ellison, the 81-year-old tech billionaire-turned-media mogul—that try to box in a man like Larry Ellison, reducing his moves to simple narratives of wealth and power. And sure, when you see news of an $8 billion deal for Paramount or a consortium buying TikTok, it’s easy to think in those terms. But I’m telling you, you’re missing the forest for the trees.
We’re not watching a billionaire build a bigger portfolio. We’re watching an 81-year-old architect lay the foundation for something far more radical: a planetary-scale operating system.
This isn't about owning companies. It's about building a computational framework to understand, predict, and ultimately solve civilization's most complex problems. It's a vision so audacious that it’s almost impossible to see unless you connect the dots between what look like wildly unrelated ventures. But once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The Central Processor: Data, AI, and the Future of Prediction
Let’s start with the core of any operating system: the processor and the data it runs on. A recent keynote from Ellison sent ripples of cynicism through the tech press. He talked about how Oracle has "vectorized" all of its customer data. Now, some reports, under headlines like Larry Ellison's latest craze: Vectorizing all the customers, framed this as a dystopian sales tactic—a way to predict what you’ll buy next. The real cynics immediately jumped to imagining how Oracle could use this to squeeze more license fees out of its clients. And maybe they’re not entirely wrong on a surface level.
But what if that’s just the test case? He talks about 'vectorizing' customer data—in simpler terms, this means converting every piece of information about a person or a company into a rich mathematical representation that an AI can understand, analyze, and reason with. It’s like translating a book into the native language of machine intelligence. What if this isn't just about selling more software? What if it's a dry run for something infinitely more ambitious, like vectorizing medical histories to predict disease outbreaks or vectorizing agricultural data to forecast famine?
To run these models, you need computational power on a scale that boggles the mind. That’s why Oracle is building data centers that are more like power plants. The new facility in Texas is planned to consume 1.2 gigawatts of power to run half a million GPUs. The environmental cost of that is staggering, and it’s a valid, serious concern. But Ellison’s answer isn’t to scale back; it’s to use that very same AI to solve the problem it’s creating. He’s betting the farm that the computational output will solve far bigger existential threats than the input consumes. It’s a terrifyingly bold gamble. Is it reckless, or is it the only kind of thinking that can actually move the needle on a global scale?
The Killer Apps: Curing Disease, Fixing the Climate, and Shaping Culture
If the data centers are the hardware, then Ellison’s other investments are the "killer apps" running on top of this planetary OS. Look at the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) in Oxford. This isn't just another university building. It's a planned £10 billion, 7,000-employee campus designed to be an application development center for humanity's biggest bugs: disease, food scarcity, and climate change.
The sheer ambition is breathtaking—a place where generative biology, AI, and robotics aren't just siloed departments but integrated tools aimed at solving food security and chronic illness, and the plan to spend all that money and hire all those people shows this isn't some vanity project, it's a full-scale assault on the impossible. One of the Institute's projects, Wild Bio, is using AI to design crops that can pull CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it away in the soil.
When I first read about the specifics of the work on biomineralization, I honestly just had to stop and process it. This is the kind of moonshot thinking that reminds me why I fell in love with technology in the first place. It’s a paradigm shift, like moving from simply documenting the world’s problems in books to writing code that actively tries to fix them.
And yes, this OS has a media and culture layer, too. The moves into TikTok and Paramount aren't just about entertainment. They’re about understanding and participating in the global nervous system of information. An operating system, after all, needs a user interface—a way to interact with the people it serves. Owning the pipes through which culture flows is an immense responsibility, and frankly, it's the part of this vision that requires the most ethical scrutiny. How do you wield that kind of influence without becoming a tool for manipulation? We don't have a good answer for that yet, and it's a question we all need to be asking, loudly.
This integration of data, health, climate, and culture is like nothing we’ve seen before. It’s as if the Library of Alexandria wasn’t just a repository of past knowledge, but a dynamic, predictive engine for the future, constantly rewriting itself to find better outcomes.
A Blueprint for the Next Century
Look, it’s easy to be cynical. It’s easy to see a billionaire’s ego, a lust for control, or a dystopian data grab. And those elements might be part of the messy human equation. But I choose to see the pattern behind the noise. I see a coherent, if terrifyingly ambitious, vision taking shape. This isn't about one man's legacy. It's a glimpse of a future where our biggest challenges are treated not as political footballs, but as complex computational problems waiting for the right hardware, the right data, and the right code to solve them. Whether this grand experiment succeeds or fails, it’s forcing us to ask a fundamental question: what happens when we finally have the power to compute our way to a better world?
