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<\/a><\/p>\nOracle co-founder Larry Ellison speaks at the White House on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.<\/p>\n
In 1999, Ellison \u2014 then No. 23 on Forbes\u2019 billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today \u2014 purchased a boat called Izanami.<\/p>\n
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: \u201cI\u2019m a Nazi.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIzanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,\u201d Ellison said in \u201cSoftwar,\u201d a 2013 biography. \u201cWhen the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was \u2018I\u2019m a Nazi\u2019 spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.\u201d He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.<\/p>\n
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison\u2019s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.<\/p>\n
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.<\/p>\n
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss\u2019 contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world\u2019s richest man.<\/p>\n
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform<\/p>\n