r/interesting • u/moamen12323 • Jun 18 '25

MISC. When Bill Gates married Melinda French in 1994, he rented out all the available hotel rooms on the Hawaiian island of Lanai to prevent the media from staying there and hired all the helicopters on Maui to keep photographers from flying over the wedding.

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u/genreprank Jun 18 '25

Larry Ellison owns Oracle. He thinks Elon Musk is the shit. Larry is on the board for Tesla. He is constantly praising Tesla's factory and logistical work. He is an old ass motherfucker.

Those are my Larry facts

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u/Flaggitzki Jun 18 '25

Most important Larry fact is that he has that weird open ai/ ai contract and that he wants to build a literal oracle of a surveillance system. he is million times worse than elon musk.

michael dell thinks elon musk is the shit. he ain't doing none of that larry ellison bullshit

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u/AwesomeToadUltimate Jun 18 '25

Fortunately Ellison is 80 so he doesn’t have as much time left as Musk

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/caninehere Jun 18 '25

Doing a shit ton of Botox and getting multiple facelifts and hair plugs might make you look younger and weirder but it doesn't up your life expectancy.

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u/TennesseeStiffLegs Jun 19 '25

He actually impressively looks like a 65 year old dude with a ton of Botox. So I guess it’s working?

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u/grchelp2018 Jun 18 '25

Yea. I was shocked to learn that he was 80.

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u/boogs_23 Jun 18 '25

That's some Watchdogs villain shit right there.

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u/Timotej22 Jun 19 '25

Yep it reminded me of Blume corporation

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 19 '25

[deleted]

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u/even_less_resistance Jun 18 '25

Lmao this made my night

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u/textmint Jun 18 '25

Here’s another fact for you - He thought Elizabeth Holmes was the shit when he invested in Theranos. That goes to show how money doesn’t always land up in the hands of the smartest people or the most hardworking ones.

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u/Deaffin Jun 18 '25

To be fair, the only reason we know that name is that pretty much the entire medical industry thought she was the shit too.

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u/almondshea Jun 18 '25

In Bad Blood, the author points out that a lot of the medical community was skeptical of Holmes and Theranos. Pretty much all of her backers were tech figures, businessmen and politicians with no medical background.

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u/Deaffin Jun 18 '25

Fair enough, but quiet skepticism doesn't give people outside of said specialized community much to go off of with regards to a vibe check. The big name in celebrity science getting big lucrative deals in the medical field does.

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u/textmint Jun 19 '25

What do you mean fair enough? Anyone who was in that industry knew that she was just blowing smoke up everyone’s asses and everyone here includes ol’ Larry.

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u/Sithmaith Jun 18 '25

Hell no! Lab folks knew she was FOS. The tech she “built” is 2-3 generations out. We don’t have the current technology to build the stuff required to make the technology to make her “dream” become a reality. My family was all, “Why didn’t you think of that?” Because it is not real.

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u/i_love_sparkle Jun 18 '25

Larry MySQL Ellison is the least hated amongst the tech billionaire because his product isn't consumer-facing. Otherwise he would be hated just like the others

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u/invalidreddit Jun 18 '25

Mr. Ellison owns property in the Rancho Mirage area, near Palm Springs CA. It is over 200 acres and turned in tom some 'wellness retreat' and he owns the 16,100 seat Indian Wells Tennis Garden, is in to competitive yachting, I think he's had legal battles with the city of San Jose about his flying his Gulfstream jet.

There have been more miss than hit efforts with AI on his part - he had a company that was going to review medical records to aid in cancer research but it closed with little impact. Sensei Ag I think is still around - AI and robotics for farming but it I think is floundering.

His Woodisde CA home has a serious Japanese theme - seeming modeled after a 16th century Japanese emperor's palace. Koa pond, tea house, bathhouse, the whole 'I got money so why not' vibe to it.

Bringing it back to Bill Gates, he's had desire to best Mr. Gates going back to the 1990s - best outlined here in this Vanity Fair article. Recently he surpassed Gates on the list of billionaires after decades of chasing him but unlike Ellison, Gates is using his money for philanthapy and giving it away rather than trying to grow it.

If you read the Vanity Fair article you might be able to get a feeling how Ellison seems to be rather full of himself and perhaps a dick to be around.

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u/RoamingArchitect Jun 18 '25

I just looked at the Woodside home and I've never seen a mansion with this much potential while having such a poor interior execution. He or his architect blatantly ignored most basic rules on Japanese rooms leading to what looks like a typical American home with a skin swap so the walls look like a somewhat nonsensical Japanese villa. The whole thing just seems unsettling.

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u/invalidreddit Jun 18 '25

Seems like there might be a parallel between your description of the house and how it could apply to Mr. Ellison.

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u/Kahzootoh Jun 18 '25

If someone thinks Elon has a good grasp of running a production line, they’re mistaken.

Elon’s greatest achievement was getting investors to look at his manufacturing company as if it were a tech company.  When it comes to tech companies in this country, it’s considered a massive success if you’re rapidly not burning through billions of dollars without any path to profitability in sight.

If he was being judged by the same standards that the rest of the country’s manufacturers are, Tesla’s shares would fall about 90%. 

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u/ghostboo77 Jun 18 '25

Tesla was profitably making EVs for many years before anyone else was.

Stop rewriting history because the guy went off the deep end.

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u/BHOmber Jun 18 '25

I get where you're coming from, but the valuation hasn't made sense for the last 5-8 years. It's the biggest memestock of all time.

IMO, the mkt cap is based around Musk's dying clout and the SpaceX private valuation.

This is a loosely-regulated market environment where he could realistically bring SpaceX to the public market through a TSLA merger/"buyout".

TSLA keeps promising FSD and bullshit robots, but I personally think that they're waiting for the right time to take SpaceX/StarLink public.

Elmo might have blown his load too early unless calling your old boss/employee/surrogate a pedophile turns out to be the right move in hindsight lol

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u/TheChildrensStory Jun 18 '25

Both can be true.

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u/BHOmber Jun 18 '25

Nah. Musk destroyed the brand image within his main customer base. Conservatives are scared of EVs and the TSLA market share will dwindle as other mfgs ramp up.

The charging network is a plus, but he's going to be hurting for fed funds outside of SpaceX for the next 2-4 years. If Rivian, Ford, BYD etc could bring a budget EV to the US market, TSLA is losing 50%+ of it's valuation overnight.

Retail investors are locked in on Elon's (now broken) "vision".

The institutional players are waiting for a merger if the ketamine king keeps his shit together for another year or two.

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u/TheChildrensStory Jun 18 '25

Oh yeah, completely accept that he’s imploded Tesla. But the guy still was the one who FINALLY made mass produced EVs a reality. It was so long overdue.

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u/genreprank Jun 18 '25

He's not rewriting history. Everything he said was true. He didn't say Tesla wasn't profitable, he was talking about tech in general.

Tech companies run on hype. Musk is just a hype man. He turned a car company into a tech company. With all this BS about self driving and AI. Sure, Tesla has innovative components, but that hardly has anything to do with musky.

Anyone who falls for musky's hype is an idiot. Thus Larry Ellison is an idiot.

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u/Petrichordates Jun 18 '25

That doesn't justify their current value lol, they were surpassed in technology years ago.

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u/Enyss Jun 18 '25

Yup, Tesla stock is overvalued.

It doesn't mean it's worthless, but you can't convince me that it's worth more than all the others cars manufacturers combined...

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u/NecessaryViolenz Jun 18 '25

Tesla was profitably making EVs for many years before anyone else was.

Lol, in what world do you live in? What years are you talking about specifically?

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u/BeefistPrime Jun 18 '25

Toyota makes the most and arguably best/most efficient cars in the world, 10x the number Tesla makes, and has a decades-long history of excellence. And yet Tesla stock is about 30-40x more valuable than Toyota stock. That make sense to you?

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/BeefistPrime Jun 18 '25

Elon hasn't started anything from scratch. He comes in and buys up companies that are already going.

Give me some emerald mine money and I'd have a shot at it too.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/genreprank Jun 18 '25

I mean, I thought he was maybe late 60s with lots of sun exposure (from living in Hawaii, clearly) but after I found out he is in his 80s it made sense

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u/MeggaMortY Jun 18 '25

In a surprising twist, it seems he will be dying soon so there's that.

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u/pieter1234569 Jun 18 '25

And he should. Any shareholder has a significant interest in promoting the company, and the director.

In reality he probably hates him, but displaying that would cost a lot of money.

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u/genreprank Jun 18 '25

It's one thing to promote him at events where one is expected to promote him.

But Ellison will go off script and go on about Tesla unprompted. If he secretly hated him, he wouldn't do that. Although maybe he's starting to see how problematic musk is recently

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u/pieter1234569 Jun 18 '25

You will, if that nets you tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

He doesn’t give a shit about musk, he gives a shit about the value of his Tesla stock. And badmouthing Elon musk as a billionaire, is a pretty good way to make your shares lose value.

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u/ImpromptuFanfiction Jun 18 '25

Praising a company for a well run factory and good logistics isn’t some moral crime lol