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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. We try to bring you one to two business and market insight episodes a day, plus typically an interview from a business leader each day during the Christmas break from about December 22 or so to January 5 will be short a decent amount of episodes, but we will still get you the one to two business episodes or insights a day or every other day or so. And thank you for listening. Today's discussion is Larry Ellison can't say no. So here's the issue with Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison's the famous founder of Oracle, one of the richest people in the world. Oracle was way up this year. Now it's still up 17% year to date. Set a bit of a comeback the last week or so after falling significantly on bad news a couple weeks ago. But here's where Larry Ellison is at. He is a gamer of all gamers and isn't is a fighter, is combative person, a leader. And right now he's right thick in the mix of this fight to try and buy Warner Brothers Discovery. He has his son, David Ellison as CEO of Paramount Skydance. Paramount Skydance is trying to unseat Netflix, which had seemingly won the Warner Brothers Discovery sweepstakes with an offer for 72 billion. Paramount Skydance had heightened that offer above that number. I think they'd gone to 77 or 80 billion. I'm not sure what the exact number is right now. But more recently, what Larry Ellison has done is agreed to guarantee part of that acquisition price. So part of the concern at Netflix was, or Warner Brothers Discovery is that Paramount Skydance would come in with a bigger number, but they wouldn't actually finish the acquisition. And then they'd be back to the risk of trying to find a deal with Netflix or somebody else. What they've asked Larry Ellison to do is guarantee a lot of that price. And so Larry Elson now is guaranteeing about half of that price, about a $40 billion guarantee. And Larry Elson's worth $300 billion or something like that. So, so Maybe it's a doable number. The reality is I don't know how much of that debt Larry, he has is liquid. But Larry of course wants to be like Elon Musk where he makes these big, big gigantic impacts. And as he gets older and older, he closes in on destiny that does not want to be said no to. And so I find this to be absolutely fascinating. To me it's a, it's a game of high stakes poker. I don't, I don't particularly love it. We're just reading this past week about this really rich guy in LA that was really rich on paper and, and died and found out that he had leveraged almost everything and his wife's trying to stay in the house. I think that was Gary Wynn or something like that. A guy who had founded Global Crossing a long time ago, supposedly worth $6 billion, but ended up being highly leveraged and not in that spot. It also reminds me a little bit of if you're in the health care sector, HCA was always the most successful for profit hospital operator. Community Health Systems, also based in Nashville, had always wanted to be the biggest and the best. And they were driven by a leader named Wayne Smith. And at some point CHS eclipsed HCF of the number of hospitals, but took on so much debt in doing so that it became like the dog who caught the car, something they shouldn't have done. And so it's fascinating to watch the unraveling and finally restructuring of CHS over the years as they got back to a rational amount of debt and became a profitable company again. And now they're doing pretty well again. But it reminds me when Larry Ellison, he just can't say no. I think he's on his fourth or fifth wife and that's all good. I know, whatever, all good. That's personal choices, stuff like that. But, but the fifth wife is a huge University of Michigan fan. So Larry Ellison, who went to University of Illinois is, is now backing the heck out of University of Michigan in their recruiting and their Nils and everything else. But, but this is a guy who's a combative, aggressive guy and in the most, the late. He used to be, you know, fighting the World cup, the, the yachting championships. But he really a fascinating, fascinatingly driven, competitive guy. And this is another example of he doesn't want to take no for an answer, doesn't want to lose. And so he's after the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery and willing to guarantee it with about $40 billion of his own. Of his own money. I think just absolutely fascinating to watch. That's our story for the day. You know, Larry Ellison can't Doesn't say no. Can't take no for an answer. I think probably that's right, the right title. Larry Ellison can't take no for an answer. In any event, if you listen to this all the way through, we are so thankful. Go online at Amazon. Buy our book Building great Businesses, Great Momentum, Overcome Setbacks and scale with confidence. And if you buy the book, you text me that you bought the book. 773-766-5322. I will send you a $25 gift card to cover the cost of the book. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Thank you very, very much.
- [05:35]
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